So, we have moved to Miami. I feel very sad about it. Yes, there is a new job, new possibilities and so on and so forth, but we have left the garden behind. Our three apple trees, two blueberry bushes, vegetable patch, herb bed, etc etc will all have to get along without us, and we will have to get along without them. Land is expensive in Miami. We're renting an apartment for now, looking for an opportunity to buy a house with lots of lawn we can turn into a vegetable garden and tropical fruit orchard. I hope we get lucky: finding a place we can afford and also a place that permits us to continue to garden as we have done will require some good fortune. Yuhfen's "from garden to kitchen" concept is so brilliant, yet we've barely gotten it started. I hope we can do some retrospective posts over the next few months, remembering all the good meals we've made using ingredients from our Illinois garden.

Miami is a strange place. We have yet to find a real farmers market. We found an outdoor market, billed as a "farmers" market, which basically replicated the produce section of Whole Foods. Organic strawberries from California, organic asparagus from Argentina, you get the picture. Just imagine moving the produce section of Whole Foods into a parking lot with tents. There were no farmers there. As I said, strange. Almost as strange as moving to the US from another country, as I have experienced before. The supermarkets are mostly terrible. I wonder where the restaurant chefs go to find their fresh produce. We went to a speciality organic produce store and bought nothing. It really was that bad. Either too expensive, or inedible.

It will be a challenge to garden here. There is hard coral underneath a very thin layer of top soil. I witnessed it first hand. The soil was less than a foot deep where I dug! Yet stuff does grow here. It is a tropical paradise in some places. And people do garden here. Yuhfen has found two Miami gardener's blogs already. There is hope, but first we need to find our Miami house and garden.