How Gardening Can Feed the Soul

In The Backyard Parables (Grand Central Publishing, 2013), author Margaret Roach uses her fundamental understanding of the natural world, philosophy, and life to explore the ways that gardening saved and instructed her. In short, she learned how the garden feeds the soul. Roach has harvested thirty years’ worth of backyard parables—deceptively simple, instructive stories from a life spent digging ever deeper—and has distilled them all in this memoir along with her best tips for garden making, discouraging all manner of animal and insect opponents, and at-home pickling. The following excerpt is an introduction highlighting her early gardening experiences and the road to finding spirituality in nature.

Once upon a time, a faithless twenty-five-year-old got down on her knees and fashioned her first garden. It was a sorry thing, but also a matter of great pride, this perennial checkerboard imprinted on a sloping bit of ground outside her family’s kitchen door.

Community Container Garden

from Life on the Balcony, apartment gardening tips and tricks, Ready Set Start those seeds... 

Hopefully you have your seed packets in hand, or will shortly. I’m sure you’re itching to get starting with our community container garden project. I know I am! The first thing to do–obviously–is to get those seeds in some seed starting potting mix and get started!

It’s important to start your seeds indoors at the right time, so that they’ll have their best shot when they move outside. To calculate when it is time to sow them, you need to know when you can last expect frost. If you don’t already know, this is a handy list of last frost dates. Once you have that date, look on the seed packet to find out how many weeks before your last frost date you should begin. Simply count backwards from your last frost date that amount, and sow your seeds roughly around that time.