Back to Eden and Mallow

Hello, I am Mr. True. My family and I live on a quarter acre lot in a suburb of Salt Lake City Utah. We are interested in growing, harvesting, and making our own food, providing for our own basic needs through our own efforts, and living in a more healthy, and sustainable way.

This blog will chronicle our efforts, and serve as a repository of the things that we have learned. We hope that it will be enjoyable and helpful to you.

This year we planted a garden in our front yard following the advice of a movie called Back to Eden. We first placed down a layer of cardboard that we got from a local store (decomposed shipping boxes), and then we got a load of horse manure compost from a local horse owner. We put the compost on top of the cardboard and planted seeds deep enough that it was moist. So far we have a lot of green growing, but we haven't seen much fruit yet (it is after all not yet late enough that anything should be producing fruit).

We have, however gotten a few salads out of the leaf crops. My personal favorite is a volunteer crop that grows wild almost everywhere in the world: mallow weed. It started growing near our tomatoes (the stuff sprouted through the compost, and grew so large that we had to eat it to help the tomatoes get more sun.)

We learned that mallow was edible by reading the book The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival, which is a highly recommended book about edible plants that grow virtually everywhere that humans live. We might write a post just about this book some day because we liked it that much.

Mallow is a mild wild green with circularish leaves. It tastes excellent as a salad, cooked, or on sandwiches. Between that and the other "weeds" that we have in our yard I wouldn't expect that we are going to buy much (if any) lettuce this year.

Another favorite volunteer crop that we have is Swiss chard, which we planted a few years ago, and which went native (so we keep getting it back every year).

There is more to say about our garden this year, so next post will probably be in a similar vein.