It feels like spring!

While sitting in my home office/craft room/"Pam Cave" this week, I noticed something peculiar about the birds in the yard: they were certifiably crazy.  They dipped and dodged and flew and soared and hollered at each other.  It was perhaps not the most poetic dance, but it was clear that spring was here, and the birds were pretty darn frisky about it.  It made me a little giddy, too, because it means it's time to get out in the yard and show it some love.  Last weekend I sat behind the counter at Grass Roots and stared longingly out the window, wanting to be home with my Honey to help him work in the yard.  Yes, it's true:  I would gladly perform hard yard labor in the sun than sit in relative comfort at the bookstore.  (This is seasonal, you understand.)  Fortunately I will be able to make up for it at least slightly next weekend when I get a few days off.  (Start praying to the weather gods now!)

There's a lot of work to be done, but above all I want to have a delicious and flourishing garden.  We have a good-sized garden at home that produces a prodigious amount of strawberries, delicious sweet corn (although not as good as that from Illinois), and a surprising number of tomatoes.  All in all, it's a good thing that I like to cook.  Like any gardener, though, I want MORE. 

Gardening is pretty new to me, although I have done a little bit of container gardening in the past.  I found the book The Bountiful Container by Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey to be particularly useful and informative.  Following an introduction that brings you the story of the authors' own container gardens, the book is well-organized and full of useful information.  They start you out from the very beginning of planning your first edible container garden, to maintaining and harvesting your crop.  It is a fantastic bible for any gardener who has to rely on containers (or who wants to expand their ground space with a few containers, like me).

I am fortunate enough to have some garden beds at home, but I have just one year of real gardening experience under my apron.  I'd really like to take it to the next level, and I think I'll be taking Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades home with me.  The book is written by Steve Solomon, founder of the Territorial Seed Company, and focuses on the particular conditions and issues that organic gardeners in the Pacific Northwest face.  It is laden with information about prepping your soil, controlling pests, and planting seeds.  Anyone can take a plant and stick it in the ground, but this book helps gardeners to nurture their plants and get the most they can from them.

Turning to look at the whole yard, my home library would be incomplete without the Western Garden Book from Sunset.  This book, the biggest of them all, features information on more than 8,000 plants.  It is practically encyclopedic.  The newest edition features color illustrations and detailed maps of gardening zones in the West.  For years I have consulted it whenever some new problem faced me in my gardening endeavors, even with the containers.  I will not be sitting down to read this book cover to cover, but when I needed to know how to prune my roses, this is where I looked.  When I wanted to know what plants would possibly avoid the destruction of deer (HA!), this is where I looked.  In a word, it's indispensable.

At summer's end, I will be faced with a booming bounty of my own fresh produce.  Whatever will I do with it?  That's when the real fun will start, because it will mean I get to cook and to eat.  Fortunately, those are two of my favorite things.  It's a good thing we have such a big freezer...

I will leave you here to fantasize about your own gardens.  In the meantime, know that I will be working hard in mine, and probably making plenty of entertaining mistakes along the way.  That's where I'll be if you don't see me here.  As ever, I'll see you in the bookstore.

Pamela.