By Mindy McIntosh-Shetter

The other day I was reminded how special and magical my childhood was in the country.

My alarm clock was my neighbor’s roosters, my taste buds were tickled by the smell of the smokehouse and my nightlight was the moon, stars, and lightening bugs.

The science of all these natural wonders was not my concern but instead I only cared about the magic.

As I got older the science tickled my nose with tantalizing knowledge and the magic Read the rest of this entry »

By Mindy McIntosh-Shetter

My career and pastime has always been gardening.

I never really wrote anything down when I was a young gardener my successes and failures drifted off with memory.

But when I had children I realized how important a garden journal really was in my busy life.

My journal has become a family history along with a record of my garden successes and failures. Family stories are wrapped up in the pages of garden diagrams, preserved seeds, photos, plant histories, and my own gardener’s bucket list plus much more. My garden journal has become a testament to how my plants and I have grown together along with how growing a garden is much like raising children.

One of my favorite stories in my journal is how red and green balls became a teaching moment for my daughter and I that I revisit each spring. When my daughter was 4 years old she decided that she would help mommy in the garden. She went and got her pink Easter basket and stepped over the little white fence Read the rest of this entry »

By Mindy McIntosh-Shetter

My grandmother always had strawberry pots lined up on her back porch.

They were filled with strawberry plants that produced the most wonderful red fruit.

This fruit filled our cereal in the morning and delighted us with a cool treat after dinner that has never been duplicated.

The treat that I reminisce about was my grandmother’s homemade strawberry ice cream.

Years later after my grandmother’s children and grandchildren moved away she converted her beloved strawberry pots into works of art. She tried growing different types of plants in each strawberry pot. First Read the rest of this entry »

By Mindy McIntosh-Shetter

As I was searching the Internet I found a response on a website that dealt with agriculture that sadden me.

A boy from Africa had a question on fertilizer.

He was doing a project in school and reached out to the global community for the answer or at least for some direction or hop.

Throughout his response he mentioned how the government was pushing for the farmers in Africa to use more and more synthetic fertilizer to compensate for reduced yields. He reached out to the global community with a simple question that still rings in my ear.

This question was simple and brief. “How long does it take for our soil to recover when soil fertility is gone?”

Soil fertility much like the Gulf after this disaster is hard to bring back to its original state. We as a society have lived through the Exxon spill, the dust bowl, and the black blizzard but as human history goes we have not learned a thing. But you as a gardener can start today by growing your own fertilizer.

Starting Comfrey

Comfrey’s name comes from the term Read the rest of this entry »

By Mindy McIntosh-Shetter

As I sit in my backyard enjoying my green tea I take stock of my space.

I have my vegetable garden, my kitchen garden, my orchard, my historical garden, and a grazing area for my rabbit Rufus.

What more could I want?If I wanted more where could I put it?

My garden grows on 1/5 of an acre and while container gardening was an option I still had the problem where to put them.

Last Saturday I went to a talk put on by my local chapter of Master Gardeners that helped me think outside the box. Vertical gardening for apartments, balconies, and anyone who had run out of space like me was the topic. This was not the “vertical gardening concept” purposed by Mr. Dickson Despommier but instead dealt with rooftop gardens and living walls. I was fascinated by this concept especially living walls.

This was something I could do without changing the whole structure of my roof for a rooftop garden. This series of blogs will Read the rest of this entry »