Weed It & Reap: Jennifer Shafer

Jennifer Shafer and daughter Chloe in teh garden of tehir home in South Toledo. Enlarge

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The Blade will feature a gardener each week during the growing season. If you'd like to be considered for Weed It & Reap, contact Tahree Lane at tlane@theblade.com, 419-724-6075, or facebook.com/thetoledoblade.

Name: Jennifer Shafer, technical specialist for medical devices, freelance writer, and garden blogger (seeded.wordpress.com), living in South Toledo.

Garden specs: Half of the garden is behind the garage and is roughly garage-sized (say 20-feet-by-22-feet). That's the vegetable garden, where the compost bin, one raised bed, and the strawberry patch are. The other half is beside the house, maybe 15-feet-by-20-feet. It contains "raised" (i.e., piled-up with extra dirt) beds and will contain a brick path once I get it completely installed. That's where herbs, greens, flowers, and beans are.

When did you start gardening?: I started in 2004, in Dayton, but my interest really bloomed in 2006 when I was preparing to marry and the house I moved into had garden space.

What do you grow?: Vegetables and herbs; some flowers mostly for the benefit of the vegetables and herbs. This year, the strawberries were devoured by slugs because I didn't put down Sluggo, but my raspberries are great. When we go out near the patch, my daughter says "nada" and we pick some.

What do you get out of it?: Homemade salsa, gazpacho, and tabbouleh. I garden for the fresh, clean produce and the satisfaction of coaxing food out of plants. Exercise and being outdoors are good, too, but it's really about the food.

Hours spent gardening: It's down to about an hour a week — not enough, partly due to my 11-month-old, partly due to laziness, partly due to being a mosquito magnet, and just not having enough time. Now that Chloe is crawling, she's going to eat tomato leaves and rocks.

Annual expense: Around $30, unless I order a lot of seeds or get ambitious about mulching or trellises. I save and trade a lot of seeds and start most of my plants rather than purchasing them, so that expense is small.

Challenges: Weeds. Weeds grow so luxuriously and so quickly, and I don't have the patience to keep up with them. And I don't like to spend a lot of money on mulch, so I don't prevent them either.

I'm proud of: The fact that I can identify a lot of plants by their leaves, some even by their cotyledons, the first pair of leaves that a seedling sprouts.

Most-used tool: The Internet, to learn when do I plant things and what is this bug what do I do about slugs? Favorite sites: ohioline.osu.edu/lines/, heirloomseeds.com, gardenweb.com, gardenrant.com.

Words to the wise: Don't plant a garden the year you have a baby. I did that last year and the garden became a jungle, and this year the weeds are already ridiculous. Did I mention I'm not good at weeding? Which is bad news because weeding is the soul of gardening.