Home Garden in the Spring
One of my favorite pastimes outside of cooking and traveling is tending to my garden at home. When we moved into our house almost 10 years ago, our backyard was all overgrown lawn and weeds with nothing else. We built garden beds after our first year here with the intent of growing our own fruits and vegetables, and to be totally honest, the results have been mixed. Some years we are really productive and other years we let nature take over with low yields if there is less time to work the yard. We are not always as disciplined about tending to the garden as one needs to be to make it hyper productive…
During the pandemic, we met Dan Penengo on one of our walks around the neighborhood. He was tending to a neighbor’s garden where he had built a small garden bed and was growing tomatoes, kale, squash and other vegetables. I was impressed by how productive this small bed seemed and how our enthusiastic our neighbor was about working with Dan. He shared his contact information with us and we went on with our walk.
Cut to this past March, when I saw Dan featured in Rhode Island Monthly for his edible home garden. What an incredible feature! I was prompted to reconnect with Dan and he took on the task of helping us with our garden. What I love about working with Dan is that he is super passionate about turning people’s home gardens into micro farms and teaching folks about working their little plot of land. His methods are natural and regenerative and he is focused on working the garden with you. I view our weekly work time as therapy with nature and I love feeling a sense of accomplishment every week when we’re done. Sometimes work doesn’t leave me too much time and attention to devote to projects — Dan is a key element to making our garden thrive this season.
This season, we have planted peas, corn, herbs, strawberries, tomatoes, assorted greens, spinach, chives, edible flowers, rhubarb, peppers, eggplants, raspberries and more. I am learning about companion plants and succession planting and how to water my garden in a conservative way. The goal is to use what we grow over at Little Sister, where our flexible menu allows us the chance to work with whatever ingredients are available.
If you are in Rhode Island and have a little patch of dirt at home that you want to turn into an edible landscape, I can’t recommend Dan enough!