Growing Inspiration (+Giveaway!)

I've been trying to grow things in any spot imaginable for some time now. Whether or not I owned the space made no difference. I'd put tomatoes and herbs in pots and rest them on my stoop or windowsill. Once, I was even so brazen as to attempt to grow green beans, tomatoes, and several other vegetables using only the sunlight filtering in from the small skylight in my 3rd floor apartment (it worked, a little; not enough sunlight coupled with a one-week failure to water the pots when I was away on vacation brought my tender green friends to their shriveled, stunted knees).

In my own yard now, if Hubs and I had the time and budget, there's no limit to what we'd be growing. We'd expand our kitchen garden; culinary and medicinal herb beds; grape vine; apple, pear, and peach trees; vining kiwi; wineberry beds; and blueberry bushes and grow a bounty of foodstuffs.

In addition to the wild foods available out here (we've got black walnut trees, nettles, fiddlehead ferns, wild violets, daylilies, and no doubt countless wild mushrooms growing in our forest-we really need a mycologist to walk the land out here and tell us what's what, mushroom-wise), there's ample room for putting in a small orchard (I'd LOVE to inoculate the bases of several hazelnut trees with truffles!!! CAN YOU IMAGINE???) in which we could grow nut trees and a few more pear, apple, and peach trees. I'd like to put in a few varieties of fig trees, as well. I'm moving our strawberry beds, so there's that. A full patch of asparagus, and artichokes, and rhubarb is on my wish list, too. I'd also really love to expand off of our kitchen with a mini conservatory where we could grow citrus trees during cooler months and transfer them outdoors when it's warm. Oh, the possibilities.

All of my mentioning this serves simply to illustrate the point that I like to grow things. And I like to watch things grow. And I like to read about growing things. And I like people who like to write about growing things. Which is what today's post, and giveaway, is all about. Amy Pennington, to quote her book's back cover, is a "food writer, organic gardener, and owner of GoGo Green Garden, an edible-gardening business that builds, plants and tends gardens for city folk in their backyards. Amy grows, cooks and lives in a small one-bedroom apartment in the heart of Seattle." Her first book, Urban Pantry (Skipstone Press, 2010) was met with wide acclaim. Amy, you see, likes to grow things. My kinda lady.

Apartment Gardening, Amy's newest book, was just published by Sasquatch Books the first of this month. I doesn't matter if the place you call home is a mere perch or a palace, there's great growing wisdom in here for everyone. Apartment Gardening is rife with ideas for planters (repurpose a metal filing cabinet!), full of details for getting started (including what grows best in containers, how to care for your plants, and getting started with seeds and propagation), and packed with both culinary and body care recipes for making use of what you've grown.

Amy's publisher has generously offered a copy of Apartment Gardening to a small measure reader. To enter the giveaway, just tell me what you'd like to grow. It can be anything. It needn't even be practical. Tell me about how you'd love to grow your own coffee beans for your java habit, or how you wish you had vanilla beans in your backyard, for your baking addiction. Hell, you can even say you wished you could grow money on trees-I wish I could! Pragmatic commenting is just as welcome, of course.

I'll keep the giveaway open for comments until one week from today, April 18th, at midnight EST. When you comment, be sure to let me know how to reach you if you win, via either a link-back to your blog, or your e-mail address. Amy's publicist, Haley, will contact you for your mailing information after I've selected a winner (which I'll do using a random number generator).

Tomorrow I'll be posting a recipe from Apartment Gardening, so be sure to stop back by. In the mean time, tell me, how does your garden grow?