About

Posted by Adina

Hi, I am Adina Lehrman. I am a Purveyor of Poo, a Compost Concoctor, an Organic Garden Consultant, and a Master Gardener Volunteer in the South Florida town where I live. I have been married for over half my life. I am a veteran tattoo artist currently off the job. My passion is to change myself from a Home Gardener to a Homestead Farmer. My interest for this blog is to stimulate others to consider gardening to grow and share food as a means for healing the environment and connecting with our local communities.

I grew up in Suburban Maryland where my father was a gentleman gardener. During the week he put on a suit and a hat and went off to work, but on the weekend we lived out in the garden. He gardened, we played. My brother sister and I are all gardeners. We only had to see him gardening to come to it ourselves. He never forced us to help him, we were just always around.

I have lots of memories from various garden seasons. We planted dried corn we picked up in a corn field in Pennsylvania. The ears we harvested were small with big kernels full of milky sweetness. We ate some raw, and put some in the cook pot. We were always around for harvest. Nothing thrilled us more than pulling something out of the ground or off the plant to eat. We ate raw pastel colored potatoes at the utility sink. We helped to dig them up. I still remember being stunned to find these beautiful light pink and green, yellow and blue potatoes all hidden there in the soil like Easter eggs. My father washed them and cut them with his pocket knife and we found out potatoes were crisp and sweet when first dug up. We even learned to dig up some roots from the sassafras tree and boil them for tea. We made tremendous pots of sassafras tea and drank it because we had brewed it! I remember my father’s compost pile in the corner of the fence line. I remember how it smelled and how he sifted it out for his gardens. One year my father over fertilized his tomatoes, and he had fabulous large green tomato plants that didn’t flower in time for the ripening season. I recently found out my brother remembered this too. We have both always worried that our plants would be over fed! Now I know how to feed the soil so that plants can feed themselves. This is the key to everything!  

I left Maryland when I was 19 and moved to South Florida where I have lived ever since. Not long after I got here I worked at a retail nursery and learned about ornamental gardening in Florida. Plants were discounted for employees there and I went to town in my own garden. Another decade later and I had my own vegetable garden and was determined not to poison my food or my soil, and I set off to learning how to grow vegetables naturally in Florida. Fifteen years later I realize that my organic/natural style of gardening is an important key to not only increasing the nutritional value of the vegetables I eat, and reducing the toxins I ingest; it is one way to help reduce my carbon footprint on this earth; it is a way to foster nature and natural ecosystems at home; it is a way to save on grocery bills; it is safer than risking e coli or salmonella from grocery store produce, and my naturally grown fruits and vegetables are way fresher than the organics I can get at the grocery store, AND my home grown vegetables and fruits were not shipped!  No petroleum product was used to bring that food to my table.

   For some reason, nothing right now seems more important to me than what I am doing here. I intend to find a living for myself in this, and I am going to try to remember to treat this vibe that way, but this is also my passion, and it feels like an important mission to bring some part of this passion to you.  For years of tattooing I sat up late nites with myriad customers, and nearly always the conversation made it’s way to gardening or growing. Isn’t this a natural direction for people to go in now?

I am for the most part a very average person, I tend to fall into the majority statistically. Therefore I believe that if this is the way I am feeling it is possible that you too feel this way, or soon will. I hope that I can help you to be a more successful gardener/ provider of food for your family/ earth steward. If you already are then I expect you will be a contributer to my site in the comments section, and for any helpful tips, I thank you.  ;D

Adina Lehrman