Here is a picture of the Harvest Heartland Gardens at Powell Gardens in Kingsville, Mo. They have a 12 acre exhibit up there that includes a garden created by Rosalind Creasy about edible landscaping. She is the queen of edible landscaping. These are some of the things I want to explore as I go along with my projects. I have plans, y'all. Wish me luck.

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.” Isak Dineson

There is so much work to do. I have never been afraid of hard work. I was a single parent, working full time, and going to school all at the same time, for years and moving several times in between all that. These were things I wanted to do. Things I wanted to be successful at, but I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I have always been energetic, OK, obsessive maybe, about the things I’m passionate about – being a mom, education and now sustainable farming or organic gardening. Now that I’ve decided to find out about sustainable farming (on a micro level!) I can’t get enough information about it. I know this winter I will spend many long, dark, cold evenings reading up on all the new things happening in the field. No pun intended…lol, well maybe. I believe we haven't treated this world very well and I can do something to make it better, even a little, will be fun and worth my while. I love picking and eating something I have grown. I hope to eventually be efficient enough to grow enough fruit and vegies to feed me and my girls and their families. But there is so much to do.
Sometimes I stand out in the backyard looking around and thinking about the things I want to do and then I see myself at the age of 97, bent over, a straw hat over my long gray hair, ( what an imagination, eh? as if I'll have any hair by then.) still working on my list of things I want to do in the backyard. Maybe that’s a good thing. If I get to 97, I will most likely have to have the great grandkids help me in the garden, which is something else I’m passionate about, getting children involved in growing things. One of my only memories of my grandma Mae is when I was about 7 and she and I went into her garden in Great Bend, Ks and picked Black-eyed peas for dinner. We were not a close family and so memories of her are few but I’ve never forgotten being in the garden with my grandmother. She always had a garden my father said. Grandma Mae went through the depression with 7 children, running her own resturaunt. Born in 1900, she grew up in Vinita, Oklahoma. They were poor with 10 kids in the family. In fact, one of the only pictures I have is of my grandmother as a teenager and her family in their garden. My father had a garden for many years, I remember him always growing tomatoes. Tomatoes tasted better when I was a child then they do now. Now tomatoes are grown for looks and the ability to be dropped from 3 feet and not break. In other words so they can be transported all over the country without shattering. So they are tough with no flavor. I want to grow heirloom tomatoes asap, so I can try to recapture the sweet/tangy taste of the old time tomatoes that I remember back in the 60's.