When I began growing vegetables and herbs on the balcony of our condo in 2007, it was a new way of maintaining some things I’d loved to do all my life: be outdoors, get grubby, and experiment. Soon after the gardening thing took hold, I had a daughter, and so, when I wasn’t getting to know this new human being  or sacked out, exhausted, I was reading about gardening, blogging about it, dreaming up weird growing contraptions, and, then, building this website. Growing and cooking food now makes up a big part of my life — a hobby that’s fast becoming a new lifestyle.

As of 2010, I have that same experimental balcony garden and, new this year, a couple of larger and more traditional community garden plots. It’s interesting to grow vegetables in a confined space, at home, and also in the ground, on a section of land that seems just about infinite by comparison. I like the creativity and resourcefulness that the balcony garden demands and, yes, the larger harvests from the community plots.  At this point, I’m interested in designing and growing gardens with more sustainable resources, and learning about what that means under different conditions in different parts of the world.

However it morphs, this site will always be about intensive food gardening, first and foremost. And it’ll ultimately reflect my interest in the process of the thing and in writing about it. While I do appreciate a nice garden gadget, you won’t find a lot of reviews here — I try to invest more of my time into gardening than my money, and experiment with what I have at hand: kitchen compost, homemade self-watering containers, potting mix and mulch made from whatever looks promising, from brown paper bags to peanut shells.

If you’d like more, read what I’ve written about designing small green gardens and sustainable vegetable gardening methods. Comment with your own ideas, and keep in touch via the Getting Fresh blog feed and the (utterly neglected but still technically possible) email newsletter.