gutter garden update

Just wanted to show off the gutter garden. It's been less than a month since we refilled it with soil and planted it, and it's doing wonderfully. I think, unfortunately, its success has a lot to do with a neighbor's tree that was removed a year or two ago. We're getting a lot more light in that area.

 The garden today.

The garden almost a month ago.

I'm so happy we planted nasturtium. It grows like a weed. Is it a weed? And it's really pretty. We've got radish and zinnia seedlings fighting with each other. If neither starts to flourish in the next few weeks I'll move the strawberries I bought last week from a window box up into the seedling spots.

We picked a colander full of different lettuces and a few nasturtium flowers to have with dinner tonight. My neighbor Paul and I were talking about how to prune the lettuce leaves so the plants keep producing more, plucking from the outside in. I hope that works! It's really, really lovely for this family who so desperately wants a real garden to be able to gaze out at that tiny bit of our own green in the morning. It gives me personally such a calming moment when I glimpse it. 

Nasturtiums on the cover of Plants and Their Application to Ornament by Eugéne Grasset.
I've always been fascinated with how the stem of a nasturtium leaf meets the leaf close to
the center, not at the edge of the leaf. And I love botanicals. Have you seen mine here? 

Our neighbor "Backyard Richard" threw up some lemons from his tree for us
while we were back there today. Nice!

Many moons ago I lived north of Albuquerque, NM in a town called Bernalillo in the tiniest two room shack. I spent most of my meager architectural intern salary on gardening. I lived literally in the middle of the desert, so I dug furrows into the sand, filled them with store-bought soil, and planted rows and rows of corn. I loved growing corn. Have you ever eaten corn within an hour of it being picked? There's nothing sweeter or more delicious. So good. 

The crazy and sad thing about the year I grew that corn is that there was a plague of grasshoppers that came through in swarms soon after my first ears started maturing. They mowed the crop down in a matter of a week. Like, sawed them down. Never seen anything like it.

Anyway, I'd love to try it again when we get a chance. Being back there today reminded me of how much fun it is to grow food (and what a money pit gardening can be)!