The First Post

Greetings to anyone who has stumbled across this blog.  I really hope it will become a useful resource for me and anyone else participating.

I've been an on and off gardener for years, and in the summer of 2006 I decided that since I had a new home with decent sunlight, I would give some container gardening a whirl again.  Simple stuff.  I had moderate success, and then discovered a really nice Yahoo group on container vegetable gardening and got all fired up.  The result was not so much a garden as it was a small farm. 

I live in the NYC/NJ metro area.  I can see the haze of Newark's sodium lights from where I live, and the NYC skyline is not far a way.   My second floor apartmenthas a lot of roofspace outside my windows, and this is where my garden is.  Happily, my landlord was more amused than furious.  

The Yahoo group does tend to be a bit more oriented to social issues than I expected, so from there I was exposed the concepts of the 100 mile diet, reasons to eat locally grown food, and how to preserve what was coming out of the garden.  The combination of the recent food safety scares, an apparent yearning to be a farmchick, and a familial tendency to minor levels of revolt and anarchy made me look into this more closely, and while I found a LOT to be had at the many local farmer's markets, I still find myself more reliant on supermarkets than I think I want to be.  So I went back to the web, as surely there must be a community of locavores in this area who share secrets on where to get things like locally raised milk or other dairy products...and there doesn't seem to be one.  I finally decided I would take it upon myself to start such a resource.  Later this weekend I'll publish a list of links I have found useful, and I would like to encourage anyone reading to share what I have missed.

I don't think I am going to get into a lot of politics here, but I do want to talk about gardening and food, share what is working for me on the rooftop, discuss the best ways to keep the garden's bounty over the winter (I am freaking psyched by the sheer number of cherry tomatoes in my freezer) and all that.  I dip around in ultra amateur photography too, so be prepared to put up with pictures of eggplant and the like.

So please share out the URL and come be chatty.