GARDENING FOR GRANNY

As some of you may know, and many of you may not, the gardening blogging world was shocked recently by the news that one of our favorites is battling a sudden occurrence of cancer (I refuse to capitalize that word)

For those of you who don’t know this remarkable lady, please click to visit her blog, Annie’s Kitchen Garden. 

"I'm a wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. My interests include gardening, music, computers, recipes, my grandchildren and my two dogs, Annie and Otto. And, of course, Mr. Granny!"

Those are her own words as she describes herself.  But she is so much more as well.  2nd Man and I personally owe her a debt of gratitude for exposing our blog to more readers.  Back when I was a young, fledgling blogger (OK so not THAT much younger, but I digress), Granny, as we all affectionately call her, stumbled across our blog and wrote a post about it.  She went back and read it from the beginning (I’m sorry to put you through that Granny, ha) and wrote the nicest post urging her readers to read ours.  As a result of that, we gained a lot of new followers, AND she inspired me to keep at it.  Many of our dear followers have come over from her blog to ours.  She gave our little slice of the blogosphere a jump start in the beginning and for that, we are eternally grateful.

((((cyber hug))))

What always amazes me about her is her tenacity and ability in the garden.  She could probably run circles around most of us in the garden (figuratively AND literally).   Her years of experience have given her an edge that we all hope to someday have, years of trial and error, success and failure, though I’m guessing she hasn’t had much failure.  Her garden totals, as part of Harvest Monday’s at “Daphne’s Dandelions” (something we hope to participate in this year), for the last few years have been huge.  Check this out:

2009 – 1070 pounds

2010 – 912 pounds

2011 – 543 pounds

2012 – 1040 pounds

2013 – 1011 pounds

Amazing harvest totals from a smallish, but well planned, backyard garden.  Even more amazing that a 75 year old woman (I promise she wouldn’t mind me shouting out her age) is doing it mostly by herself.

 

But now our dear sweet Granny is fighting a different kind of battle outside of the garden.  She is so upset that she is not going to be able to have a garden right now, though somehow, I think she might sneak some in anyway, and I hope she does.   There is so much we all wish we could do in reading the comments on her blog and so I thought of this small gesture.

How about we all dedicate our gardens this year to her?  Let’s all garden FOR her to show our solidarity and support of her fight and show her how much we care. 

“Gardening for Granny”

You know how I publish images of historical gardening posters every Sunday?  I sure wish I was better at graphic design so I could come up with a logo and a badge like one of those posters that we could all put on our sidebars.  If someone is good at that and would like to create something, go for it and let us know.  I'll admit I don't exactly understand how 'link ups' and all that works, but if someone will point me in the right direction, I'll figure it out.

I was thinking how nice it would be if we all gave her a shout out this year with our gardening efforts and linked back to her blog so she can see what we are doing when we do it.  Let’s all garden for her so that she can live vicariously through our efforts and who knows, hopefully she’ll pop in to give us each advice from time to time and then in a way, we can all have Granny helping us out in our gardens.  See Granny, you'll get that gardening done this year after all!  If you are so inclined, please help spread the word, or stop by her blog and leave a message of support and lets show Granny how much we care.

So this year, our first year of having a ‘real’ garden at the farm, is for her.

We all love you Granny!