My name is Jenny. I’m a writer, spinner, knitter, quilter, bread-baker, and now gardener. (My husband wonders whether I’ll someday run out of new crafts to learn.) My e-mail address is shajen at gmail dot com (you know the drill).

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where my parents kept a vegetable garden in the backyard and blackberries and huckleberries grew wild just down the street. I can’t say my brother and I helped much in the garden, except by thinning the carrots. (Young carrots, freshly plucked from the ground, rinsed with warm hose water, and doused in lemon juice and salt stashed in the rock wall all afternoon for just this purpose, are the best things on earth.) The first year that we were both teenagers and had finally stopped playing in the backyard, my parents were able to dig up their first fall carrots. Those carrots–long, beefy–lingered in the garage all winter as we slowly ate them down.

I first thought seriously about gardening myself when I bought my first house in Dayton, Ohio. I was only in that house a year and only put in a couple of tomato plants, a blueberry bush, and some small sad bulbs. Now I live in Toledo with a non-gardening husband and two vegetable gardens. 2008 is my second year of true gardening, and I’m still learning how things grow (including flowers, the next frontier). In 2009, we hope to move back to the Pacific Northwest, for family and a better environment. I have to admit that moving from zone 5 to zone 8 has an appeal entirely separate from all the other reasons we’re going.