About
Planet Veggie Garden
We’re amateur gardeners in Oakland, California.
Year in and year out we’ve planted and eaten. But this year we’re upping the ante and decidedly focusing on improving our production.
While some will gripe about the chocking cost of produce - particularly organic. We’ll gather up the basics and the slightly exotic produce just outside the door and savour fresh, sustainably grown, nutrient packed delectables.
While some will worry about tainted food. We rest assured our produce is clean AND fresh.
While the environmentally passionate warn us about earth abuse, we’ll be keeping our carbon foot print light while we honor our local and sustainable harvests.
We hope you’ll join us in our adventures as we have fun and up our production in our urban veggie gardens and (micro) orchards. We’ll explore gardening methods such as no-dig and companion gardening, worm farms and composting, irrigation, drying, canning and freezing and what else can you do with zucchini.
Sandy Der
Doesn’t Everyone Garden?
I grew up watching - and then helping - both my grandmothers in their vegetable gardens.
Growing a garden just seemed like what most people did. It’s hard to know how much an impact it had on me… how much I learned… and how much I appreciate food and the magic of planting a seed and watching it grow.
During college and my young adult life when I moved around from place to place without my own patch of dirt, I relied on community gardens. Different climates, different soil, different bounties.
I now work the soil in sunny Oakland, California. I have a great backyard decorated with box containers. And over the last couple years I’ve taken over the front yard… now my (micro) orchard and melon patch.
Through gardening as well as regular trips to San Francisco Chinatown food markets and learning to cook with my Mom, I developed a reverence for food that lead me to a career as a professional chef for many years.
There’s nothing better than the taste of homegrown – choosing the varieties for flavor. Freshness and harvesting at the peak of ripeness preserve flavors lost in commerce. Chefs love homegrown!
I love all the smells and sounds in the garden world and the deep satisfaction of cultivating great, really healthy food to share and eat. And of course the challenge of out smarting the squirrels.
I’m fortunate to work from home… as a holistic Nutrition Consultant. I use my garden to teach clients ways to add some health into their life.
Patti Clark
Production, Production, Production
Ahh, the romance of tilling the soil. I hear folks talk about that.
Me. No waxing poetic. Tho ironically I am a writer.
Instead, I incessantly yammer on about productive land value.
The (perhaps) overly pragmatic one.
Want a tree - make it a fruit tree. Why plant flowers when you can plant something edible. And lawns… waaayyy too much work for?!?
I was a city kid. My Mom inconsistently put in a few tomato plants in the summer. That was the extent of my brushing with childhood gardening.
I was never really “introduced” to gardening, nor did I have any inclination toward it. I was quite comfortable with the separation of food growers and food eaters; farmers and grocery shoppers.
That changed when I got my own backyard as an adult. Somehow it seemed obvious to me that it should be productive. Thus began my first haphazard venture into veggie gardening.
Every year I try to get more out of my urban “farm”. I learn more about cultivating and more about food. And, funny enough (cue the Green Acres theme song), at the top of my “when I win the lottery” list is: buy a few acres and grow all my veggies and fruit.
Meanwhile I gaze out my home office window at the “crops” and enjoy my gym-free workouts in the garden… and of course the rewards of production.
