Winter Gardening

Here in the Northeastern United States winter gardening for most of us consists of reading, scheming and dreaming. That can mean reading a book about gardening, perusing catalogues, making a garden plan, ordering seeds or just sitting and drinking a cup of tea or coffee and staring at a snow covered garden and seeing a lush, fertile garden in your mind.

This is cyberspace after all so much of that stuff is done these days on computers and smart phones. I've spent some time over the past few days looking at websites to see what's out there to recommend. I searched "community garden(s) and "community gardening" and was happy to see this blog showing up in the 3rd or 4th page of community gardening results. By far the most viewed pages were the American Community Gardening Association website pages. It is the best place to start a search for information whether you are starting a community garden, looking for a garden near home or doing research about community gardens. It is the only website I have listed on this blog so far. The other website I highly recommend is City Farmer .This is their older site which has hundreds of articles between the years of 1994 and 2008. You can literally spend days looking through articles. They have a new site called City Farmer News with over 75 categories of information - everything from Africa to Zimbabwe. You can find excellent information on composting and all kinds of cool stuff. Today in one of those cool articles I discovered that January 8th, 2011 is the 25th anniversary of the destruction of The Garden of Edena seminal event in the history of New York City community gardening. An exhibit of photographs chronicling this garden or earthwork will be at the Fusion Arts Museum from Feb 2 to Feb 20.

If you have the inclination to look at community gardens you can find websites for gardens from New Orleans (inspiring), Edinburgh, (Scotland - always wanted to go there), Silicon Valley (called 'Sustainable Community Gardens' ) , Plattsburgh, NY (cold) or O'ahu (hot and real dirt gardening in the winter). A trip around the country and the world can be inspiring to the gardener frozen out of his or her garden.

There is so much more out there. A lot of it is repetitious but there is always something new to be discovered even to those that think they have seen it all. Many sites, like this blog invite comments and for those who like to be more interactive there are listservs and meetups to ask questions, give answers or opinions or just follow others conversations. The ACGA listserv is a good place to find interesting discussions and once you sign up you can search the archives. But that's another story for another post.