Thinking About Starting a Garden? Jump Right In!

Reader Contribution by Colleen Vanderlinden
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All is right with the world again. Tiny seedlings huddle beneath the fluorescent lights in my basement, and the little greenhouse is full of more cool-season plants, waiting to be planted out into the garden. They are all so delicate looking. Yet these plants will feed my family throughout the spring, summer and fall. We’ll eat the food they produce through the winter as well, thanks to all of the freezing, drying and canning I’ll be doing this summer. From a few flats of tiny seedlings, a family of six will eat like royalty.

This is the magic of gardening. So many obsessed gardeners, like me, compare gardening to a drug. Once you start, you just have to keep doing it. And you soon find that one little container, or one 4-by-8 bed, is no longer enough. You want to grow more, and you want to start earlier and end later! Soon, you’re erecting greenhouses and low tunnels in your garden, because they’ll buy you a few more precious weeks. It’s the best kind of addiction I can imagine.

I may be the worst (or best, depending on your views) type of gardening addict. I’m not content to just garden for myself. Not anymore. I can’t keep quiet about how awesome it is to grow your own food, to make your own little corner of this Earth a beautiful, fruitful place — and one that does it in partnership with nature instead of in opposition to it. I write, I talk, I encourage. I give seedlings and seeds. I show up at my mother-in-law’s house with a few blueberry plants, some compost and a bit of peat.

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