organic garden

How My Garden Grows

Did you look at the header image for this post? I mean, did you really, really look at it? Did you notice the 3-inch pea plant poking up in the back? The tiny little green strawberries? The radishes and greens? That's my organic garden, friends. My garden.

I know, I know -- it's not cool to brag, and I don't mean to boast (but "I'm intercontinental..."), but of all the life challenges I've taken on in the past two years, growing a successful organic garden has always seemed like the one I was least likely to achieve. It's still early, you're probably thinking, don't take that victory lap quite yet. 

And still, looking at my garden makes me a little bit giddy. Here's a little bit of back story:

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New Harvest Moon Co-Op Has a Shine for Its Community

The story of how the newest Twin Cities area co-op came into existence is a testament to the power of community.

First, a commitment to community sparked the idea more than five years ago.

“I grew up in a small town,” explained Kari Pastir-Smith, one of the founders of Harvest Moon, in Long Lake, Minnesota, and now its marketing chief. Last week, she sat down with me, a Harvest Moon member, and Peter Doolan, Harvest Moon’s general manager, in the new store’s cheery, sunlit deli. “I saw Long Lake as a small town, too,” she continued, “except that it didn’t have a grocery store, and it didn’t have a gathering place to bring the community together in a cohesive way. With Harvest Moon, we now have both.”

For a while, though, there were doubts about whether they could actually pull it off.

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The Evolution of Minnesota's Own Gardens of Eagan

Linda Halley and I stand in the middle of a seemingly empty, sunny field under an impossibly clear sky. She bends over and touches her fingertips to the soil, raking them gently over the top, exposing slightly blacker, wetter soil underneath the grayish first layer. "I don't see any – Oh! There's one. Do you see that?" she asks. "That's the beginning of a weed," Halley explains. Now I see it. She's turned up a tiny matchstick of white, barely noticeable, and easily dismissed as a piece of dried grass. It's the sliver of the root or maybe a stem. Weeds: competition for nutrients, water, and sunlight. Weeds: enemy of the crop and therefore enemy of the farmer. As the manager of the Minnesotan organic farm, Gardens of Eagan, Halley can't use herbicides to rid herself of these pesky plants.

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The First Garden

Just after the ground was broken on the White House's new, organic garden, the Washington Post quoted obama-gardenMichelle Obama as follows:

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