Today Nate’s modelling Gayla Trail’s Poo Powered onesie. Thanks, Gayla! It’s one of our favourites.

(This kid has no idea how many hours of weeding he has ahead of him in life.)

The whole shebang. Most of the seeds were either heirloom tomatoes (the trend continues!) or flowers.

I received the seed package on Friday afternoon, and today I sorted through and chose a couple of packets to keep:

Malabar Edible Climbing Spinach
Nasturtiums
Tithonia Mexican Torch Sunflower
Broccoli Romanesco

The source for all of these is unknown, but I can start them all either directly in the ground or outside when the weather warms up.

What I put in (pile on the left) and what I took out (pile on the right).

I think I put some pretty nice packets (all brand new) back into the envelope for the next person:

From Thompson & Morgan:

Morning Glory “Carnevale di Venezia”
Tomato “Vilma”
Pepper “Chili Pyramid”
Pepper “Mohawk F1 Hybrid”

From McKenzie: (You can follow McKenzie on Twitter now.)

Strawberry “Patio Temptation”

From Burpee:

Money Garden Pepper “Home Run”
Money Garden Tomato “Steak Sandwich” (The name of that one makes my mouth water.)

From Richters:

Poppy Opium Blue Seeded

From Heritage Harvest Seed:

Early Blood Turnip Beet

And from Mr. Fothergill’s:

Lettuce “Romaine”

I hope whomever ends up with these has good success with them!

Previous years’ exchange posts:

• YGG Canadian Round Robin Seed Exchange 2009
• YGG Canadian Seed Exchange, 2007

Have you seen “It’s Complicated” yet? If you haven’t, and you’re a gardener, this is a movie you won’t want to miss.

On the way home from the movie I was telling Graham about how during the scenes that take place in the gardens, I was barely paying attention to the film’s dialogue, everything was so lush and green and growing in those scenes.

“You should write about it for your gardening website,” he told me.

When I came home and Googled the film title in conjunction with the word garden I found that I’m late to this party. Other garden bloggers have already written all kinds of things about this make believe movie garden which was supposed to be situated in Santa Barbara.

A Los Angeles Times’ L.A. at Home blogger, Deborah Netburn, did an interview piece on the utopian garden in “It’s Complicated” with Jon Hutman, the movie’s production designer. She writes,

While there are no CGI cabbages or rhubarb special effects in the film, this is still not a garden that is humanly possible, even for Martha Stewart. The vegetables were grown in a greenhouse for two months before the garden scene was shot, and any plant that looked a little scrubby was not used.

So that’s the key to having a beautiful kitchen garden! All you need is a greenhouse and a set designer to keep everything looking good.

Do you think Alec Baldwin is the type of man who pulls weeds?

And as Andrea Bellamy of Heavy Petal put it so correctly in her post, “Sneak peak at It’s Complicated kitchen garden,”

It’s all very idyllic in a potager-meets-Spanish-Colonial kind of way, and I want it desperately.

So yes, even though the garden isn’t actually possible for the average vegetable gardener to attain, it was still really fun and beautiful to look at, especially this time of year in Ontario when the ground is partially covered with snow and everything is freezing and gray. Inspiration often appears in the unlikeliest of places, doesn’t it?

(Photo credit: Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Studios)

5 people will win tomato seeds by leaving a “nice” comment on one of the posts on Cynthia Sandberg’s beautiful blog, Grow Better Veggies. Five people will be chosen at random to with a three-pack of rare tomato seeds from TomatoFest.com.

As Cynthia says in her latest e-mail newsletter, TomatoFest.com is

a fabulous on-line resource for over 600 different types of heirloom tomato seeds.

Sounds like a great contest to enter!

Enter our Facebook Fan Page contest! One lucky winner will win four tickets to the Canada Blooms Early Morning Tour on Saturday, March 21. Experience a behind-the-scenes look with a guided tour of the gardens. To enter, become a member of our Facebook Fan Page by visiting facebook.com/canadablooms. Draw date is March 1, 2010. Prize is valued at more than $160.

Tickets to Canada Blooms make the perfect Valentine’s Gift for that special someone. Special $16 discounted tickets are available online at canadablooms.com.

If you’ve had enough of salting and shoveling for the season, get ready to dream of spring and attend the 3rd Annual Seedy Saturday Garden Show in Pickering. The event takes place on Saturday, February 6 at East Shore Community Centre (910 Liverpool Road South, Pickering), and includes displays and seminars with more than 30 local vendors and garden associations and a seed swap.

USC will be there too! Kate Green, who manages our Nepal program and campaigns in Canada and internationally on food sovereignty, will be on hand with plenty of USC DVDs, seed maps, and our new Jottings newsletter. And she would love just to chat about the work of our farmer friends overseas. So while your gardens sleep under their blanket of snow, why not come out for a visit?

Seedy Saturday runs from 10am-3pm on February 6, and admission is just $3. Bring seeds to swap if you have any. There’s plenty of free parking. Find out more about the event from Mandy at 905-683-8401.

My husband, Graham and I are so pleased to announce the birth of our son, Nathan James! He was born on November 24 at 8:13 pm.

If you’ve been asking to be added to the Green Thumb Blogroll, please have patience…I’ll be updating the blogroll when our babymoon is over!

There hasn’t been much action out in the garden since early autumn. My husband, Graham, helped me out a lot this year in getting things cleaned up out back. We actually managed to clip back all of the perennials and he helped me pull the finished plants from the vegetable garden after we harvested the tomatoes.

This year we didn’t keep all of our harvest to ourselves, preferring to keep things simple and give a lot of it away to friends and family members. (Although we did, of course, manage to roast several big baskets of tomatoes and froze four large ziplock bags of roasted tomato sauce.) Our next-door-neighbour traded us some nice little potatoes that he grew for some of our tomatoes, too.

Baskets of homegrown tomatoes, peppers and eggplant for our friends and family.

That little veggie trade had me thinking, actually, that since there are three of us now in a row on my street who grow vegetables, we should try to co-ordinate a little bit, and share our harvest.  We could collectively grow more food than we could individually.  I’ll have to give this some thought over the winter!

But now here it is, late November, and it’s been an unseasonably mild autumn this year, for which I’m grateful. Now there is the potential for snow flurries this coming week, the same week our new family member is expected to arrive (we have an induction scheduled for Monday).

I hope that although we’ll be busy with the new baby, I’ll have more time in general to devote to writing online over the coming year. We’ll be sure to post when the baby comes!

for the man who loves me unconditionally and has agreed to walk through this life with me,

for wonderful, supportive friends,

for safety and health of my family members, near and far,

and for the glorious colours of autumn.

Happy Thanksgiving!