Gardener's Group discussion
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message 101:
by
Bloomin’Chick (Jo) aka The Eclectic Spoonie
(new)
May 13, 2009 07:02AM
Welcome Ms.J!
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True, the birds had more of them last year than I did but I was ok with that.
I love blackberries! That's too bad though. It will probably happen to me too, but I'm hoping to at least get a few.
I had no idea - thanks for the tip Kelly Jo!
Kelly Jo wrote: "Anyone know an anteater for hire? "(Snerk!) Uh, no! lol
message 106:
by
Bloomin’Chick (Jo) aka The Eclectic Spoonie
(last edited May 18, 2009 08:08AM)
(new)
I've done a little spring cleaning, straitening up & re-arranging the folders and such. I've added a folder for our seasonal discussions (ie Spring 2009) and one for our garden themed group reads. I've also added a book shelf where you can add your idea's for our gardening themed reads.
Welcome Sonya!
Jo wrote: "Welcome Sonya!"
Hello! Thank you for the welcome. My husband and I have always put lots of flowers in, but this year we're doing our first veggie garden. We're getting it in a little late because it's been so wet this year. I've been reading and rereading "The Vegetable Gardner's Bible." Wonderful book especially for a veggie newbie.
Hello! Thank you for the welcome. My husband and I have always put lots of flowers in, but this year we're doing our first veggie garden. We're getting it in a little late because it's been so wet this year. I've been reading and rereading "The Vegetable Gardner's Bible." Wonderful book especially for a veggie newbie.
Hi, I have just found goodreads and this group. I have been gardening for around 10 years, container gardens (herbs, vegetables and flowers), flower gardening and roses. I look forward to this group.
Welcome Eileen!
Welcome Randy!
Welcome Courtney!
Welcome Alexandra and Cheri!**To all, please feel free to get your own threads going!**
;~)
Welcome to new members!
I am looking forward to being part of this group although I am more of an obsessive/compulsive gardener. I love my garden until something goes wrong. I am not very good at diagnosing problems, so once something starts dying, I start ignoring it. Still, we re-did all our garden beds over last winter. I managed to get them mostly planted this spring, and most of the plants made it through our hot summer. I lost my rosemaries and my yews. I've had time to recover from their untimely deaths and it is starting to cool down so I am venturing back to the gardening centers to find replacements.Thanks for having this group.
Thanks and welcome Iris! Obsessive/complusive works well here too! LOL
Welcome Robin and Kathrynn!
Hello, I am a reader and a gardener, but I just searched out this great group for a specific reason--my book group, which contains many avid and talented gardners, is about to plan our programs for 2010 on the theme of garden/landscaping/agriculture. Our theme this year has been food, and we just today had a report on the wonderful Animal, Veg, Miracle, so gardening seemed to grow naturally from that.What I want to seek from all you experts is book suggestions. I think for reports and discussions we need stories, journals, accounts, bios, etc., beyond the many gorgeous picture books of gardens.
Is there a garden book list on Goodreads? Would the books on this group's shelf be a good place to start? Do any of you have suggestions from having done this sort of thing in your own book clubs?
All advice would be most welcome.
Welcome Martha! I appreciate your asking us for assistance and I hope we're able to provide you with some. My only conditions are: I ask please that you be an active member here at Obsessed Gardeners out of courtesy to our members & any assistance we provide. I also ask that you credit us with any assistance we are able to give you and your group. Thanks for your cooperation & much appreciated! I know there is a gardening fiction list over at the Listopia section of Goodreads but I'm unsure if there's a nonfiction gardening list. ("Listopia" should appear some where at the top of your Goodreads page, click on that and then there should be an option to "search" the lists in the right hand column. Start with Gardening & go from there).
There are many wonderful gardening related food books which may or may not be already listed on our shelves. I know of some off hand but am on my cell and can't add links & do other things I can on the site on our pc. I will get back to this by week's end. I hope that's alright!
-Jo
Jo, Many thanks for your suggestions. I've looked at the lists and found one called Sustainability which had a number of promising looking titles. I will certainly credit this group with any guidance we use. Indeed I find the whole goodreads site a godsend, and it seemed a natural place to turn immediately for this question.If you have an opportunity to let me know of any books you yourself have found interesting or useful, I would be most grateful.
Martha
You're welcome & will do Martha!
message 125:
by
Bloomin’Chick (Jo) aka The Eclectic Spoonie
(last edited Oct 27, 2009 04:30PM)
(new)
Martha, I haven't forgotten about you! I'm under the weather with strep & a sinus infection amongst other things so I'm a little behind. I'm going to start a new thread for you in the "A Little Bit Of Everything" section so we don't bog down the Welcome & Intro's thread here.Here's the link: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2...
Welcome Cynthia! Feel free to drop in here and tell us a little about yourself! Glad to have you!
Hi everyone! Reading and gardening are 2 of my biggest passions, so this group seems like a great fit. I'm a 50-something living in the middle of the Great Plains, out in the country. We have 10 acres and we're trying to restore prairie on 5 of those acres, which is giving us a fun challenge that gives me (yet another) great excuse to buy more books.
Besides prairie restoration, I like heirloom vegetable gardening, native plants, organic and sustainable gardening, the interaction between plants and animals, overflowing garden beds and bookshelves, dogs, cats, insects, birds and bird feeding, all sorts of other animals, genealogy and "antiques".
Hmmmm. When I list it all out like that, no wonder I always feel like I have way more that I want to do than that I can actually accomplish!
I'm looking forward to sharing gardening and reading experiences here....
Lol Cynthia! When I list out all I want to for any given period of time, I feel the same way! Welcome again!
Hi Cynthia and welcome. Sounds like you will be a great addition to the group with your wide range of interests. I'm friends with a guy who actually started a company called Prairie Restoration about 20-25 years ago and remember the blank stares he recieved when he first started out and would talk about what he envisioned for its future. I'm happy to say he and the company have thrived. I love to hear from people who share this interest.
Hi Cheryl, I'm really excited about being a part of this group. Your friend's company sounds very interesting. What state does he operate out of? Does he mainly work with commercial, residential, or government projects?
Hi everyone,I am brand new to goodreads and am a gardening newbie. I've only successfully grown things like tulips & other low maintenance flowers and am hoping to plant some easy veggies next spring and possibly keep a few hens. I've tried squash and basil in the past and had little success. The squash plants bloomed lovely flowers but the actual squash died on the vine and my basil was left out on a too cold night and perished :( I refuse to give up though and recently planted some organically grown garlic. I figure I can't screw that up too bad (but we'll see!) Anyway, I'm glad to be here and will probably have lots of questions.
Hi WagMore, I'm new to goodreads, too, but looking forward to sharing my love of gardening and reading with other, similarly inclined, folks. Where do you garden?
Hey Cynthia--the company is in Minnesota, located about 50 miles north of the twin cities. I think Ron has done all of the above with most concentration on commercial properties. However, about 5 years ago they opened a retail greenhouse operation on their property. I've found some very interesting shrubs, grasses, ground covers etc there. I feel very fortunate to have this type of resourse so close to where I live. Over the years I have seen ads for Prairie Resto in national gardening magazines, but I don't know if they have a retail catalog. If I find out I will let you know.
Hey WagMore--welcome aboard. Don't be discouraged with your gardening mishaps. Over the years I think I've learned more from my mistakes than anything else. I'm lucky to have several good friends who enjoy gardening as much as I do and we share our oops and have a good laugh and learn from one another.
Cheryl, I'm always on the lookout for good sources for prairie plants. Your friend's company sounds really interesting.
BarkLessWagMore wrote: "Hi everyone,I am brand new to goodreads and am a gardening newbie. I've only successfully grown things like tulips & other low maintenance flowers and am hoping to plant some easy veggies next s..."
Welcome! Glad to have you!!! Gardener's never give up, regardless of the heart breaks we encounter in the dirt, lol!
I love that Kelly Jo!
I'm new to Goodreads, but not to gardening. For the last 3 years, my husband and I have been homesteading, working up to growing all of our food. (We're already there with veggies and eggs!)Last year, I got obsessed with permaculture and forest gardening. I'm also starting to learn to propagate edible mushrooms.
I'm glad to meet you all!
Welcome Anna! So glad to have you! Homesteading sounds like hard yet rewarding (and exciting!) work. I think you would like our current group read (if you haven't read it already!), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle A Year of Food Life. Perhaps you can join us as we're picking up the discussion now that the holidays have passed. Looking forward to getting to know you here!
I read it and loved it, but it's been a while and I'm not sure if I remember enough to comment. I'll have to drop by that discussion!
Anna, It's exciting to find another person interested in permaculture and homesteading - it sounds like you and your husband are well on your way to living lightly on the planet and becoming self sufficient. If you don't mind my asking, where do you live and garden?Also, what is forest gardening, other than perhaps shade gardening? Are you trying to grow crops in a woodland setting? Or harvest non-edible products?
My husband and I dabble in organic vegetable gardening. (All our gardening is organic - we dabble in vegetables... :-) ) I'm restoring prairie to about 7 of our 10 acres here in southcentral Kansas. My other interests tend to revolve around gardening with native plants and gardening for wildlife.
I look forward to discussing interesting homesteading and permaculture reads with you!
We live in the mountains of southwest Virginia (zone 6.) And I'm glad to talk about forest gardening all day! It's an offshoot of permaculture which combines fruit and nut-producing trees with herbs and vines to mimic a natural forest. The ultimate book on the subject is Edible Forest Gardens Volumes One and Two. The two volume set is long, but it's well written and will get you so excited you go out in the snow to plan your edible forest garden!!Restoring prairie sounds like a lot of fun. I'll bet you could use some of the tips in Edible Forest Gardens to combine your prairie with some useful-to-you plants and get the best of both worlds.
Glad to meet you!
That sounds exciting, Anna. I've read just a little about permaculture and the idea intrigues me, but so far we haven't pursued it much beyond that. I don't know how much forest gardening would pertain to us, as our land should be 95% tallgrass prairie (if it were to return to what it was before European settlement), but I know that we can (and should) use many of the permaculture concepts.Have you ever read Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden? It's subtitled "A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture" and I think it is superb as a basic guide to using permaculture concepts in a typical smaller suburban yard.
I've never heard of permaculture or forrest gardening, but you have me curious. I'll follow your adventures with interest and try to learn more about these concepts.
Cynthia --- I'm ashamed to say that I got Gaia's Garden out of the library at the same time as Edible Forest Gardens and got so intrigued by the latter that the former got returned without being read. Since you liked it, I'll have to give it another shot!Cheryl --- I only heard about permaculture last year, and it kinda blew my mind. :-) If you're into organic gardening, permaculture is the next logical step. It's all about working with the earth instead of against it, using more perennials, and mimicking nature.
message 148:
by
Bloomin’Chick (Jo) aka The Eclectic Spoonie
(last edited Jan 03, 2010 10:06AM)
(new)
Anna wrote: "I read it and loved it, but it's been a while and I'm not sure if I remember enough to comment. I'll have to drop by that discussion!"Please do! We'd love to have you!
And that book you've linked to above sounds really interesting!
Cynthia, Gaia's Garden sounds very familiar to me. I'll have to see if I've read that one.
***I also wanted to welcome Ang, Mark, Dee, Suburbangardener, Phillip, Marlis, Gina and Kim to our group!***
Anna--I just put "Gaia's Garden" on my to-read list as it sounds very interesting to me. I'm struggling with a veg garden that's becoming too shaded by some pine trees growing across the back of my yard. They're not mine, so I can't have them cut down and maybe I can figure out a way to work with what I have.
Blueberries! But I guess you probably want some veggies too? :-)
Gardener's Group
Books mentioned in this topic
Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (other topics)Introduction to Permaculture (other topics)
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (other topics)
Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web (other topics)
Edible Forest Gardens (other topics)
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