Ok, so I've done that before.
I've read lots of books. (Or, at least, the first bit of pages in lots of books).
But not this one, so this totally counts.
(And I finished just in time for it to work for my week 2 accomplishment!)
I really randomly found this book in the library and I learned a lot from it. The book is about one family's mission to live off the land for a year- and they do it in a super-inspring way. I have the blackest of thumbs but going into every spring, I get excited about the possibility of TRYING to grow my own food. I think it would be beyond cool to be able to feed my family food that I grew with my own physical labor. But, I always manage to give up and kill things before that ever becomes a reality. This book provided a lot of insight about the importance of being able to do what I've been trying to do for years. It's no secret that we rely off everyone else for every meal we eat. I really like the idea of being able to do it myself and finally being successful in that.
That being said, I'm going to give a garden a go again this year. This book also gave me the idea to look for a gardening guru that I can learn from. I didn't grow up in a family that gardened. While my Mom was superthrifty, she also worked 2 jobs. My dad worked 12 hour shifts 6 days a week. So, when I decided a few years ago to try gardening (and the several years that I've tried since), I end up disappointed. I want to work closely with someone who knows what they are doing so maybe, just maybe, gardening won't feel like such a foreign subject to me.
So, this book did good things for me. It challenged me in a lot of ways and made me think about things I would rather not (specifically, corporate farming and what that really looks like). While I believe that I'll never become 100% organic in the truest sense of the word, I feel inspired to give a few things a try. I'll try out farmer's markets and try, again, to grow tomatoes.
The book's website is:
You may recognize the author, Barbara Kingsolver- she also wrote The Poisonwood Bible (which will likely be next on my reading list).
I loved this book, she reads the audiobook and her voice is just lovely. A recent issue of Martha Stewart talks of indoor lemon trees and I thought, just what I need and I'll be making lemon bars and lemonade in, well, two years because that's how long it takes to mature.
ReplyDelete(p.s. I'm having a hard time signing in with my google account, no word verification comes up) ~udandi
Thanks for the comment, Andi! You win the first commenter award :)
ReplyDeleteI saw lots of ads for all sorts of fruit trees in the paper from Sunday and totally wanted all of them. :) But first, I'm going to try the tomatoes- they are my nemesis!
Have you read The Poisonwood Bible? I'm going to try to do so soon!
Thanks for the info about logging in, I'll try to get that taken care of!