Mike McGrath @ NCC

I know we have (or had, before we became such lazy bloggers) a number of local readers—so I figured I would share this bit of news that Our Friend Ben passed along from The Morning Call:

On May 10, McGrath will partner with the Greater Lehigh Valley Chefs Association to present a program on small-space gardening. The talk, ''Grow Your Own Kitchen Garden Goodies,'' is at 6 p.m. in Northampton Community College, Bethlehem Township.

''In the Lehigh Valley, there's no excuse for not growing food in your garden nine months a year,'' says McGrath, who in February was eating lettuce grown in his garden. ''The gardening season is not June to August, as many people think.''

Should be a good presentation. And there's food! Can't beat that.

Kickin' it at Crayola

A couple weeks ago we were invited by some of the folks at Crayola to do a little garden workshop for kids. The event was targeted towards teaching kids how to live healthy. There were all sorts of workshop activities designed to show kids how play is exercise, how nature is cool, bike safety, and other stuff like that.

Our little area was all about growing your own food. We showed the kids how to make newspaper pots and then we gave them some dirt and a seed. The seeds we brought were nasturtiums, bush beans, and basil—We figured that we would go with all edibles.

The turn out was pretty good and I guess we made quite a connection, because we've been invited back to give a how-to talk about starting your own backyard garden. Crayola's community outreach is pretty awesome and they are very environmentally aware.

Below are just a few of the kids we met at the workshop. Oh yeah, we had them decorate the pots too. They really seemed to enjoy it.

Movin' right along

Last year at this time we were preparing for a move to a house we didn't own. Everything in the garden was late and we completely missed the early season. This year is a different story.

We have about 112 little pea shoots (1/2 shelling, 1/2 snow).


This will be the strawberry bed. In the space around each plant we planted spinach seeds; we'll see how that goes.


Our garlic is doing quite kickass.


I'm hoping we'll be having salads soon. I don't know if you can see it, but there are little onions growing between each row of lettuce.