It's the end of March, thank goodness! We won't have winter much longer, though right now summer seems like years away... Even in middle - or late - winter, gardeners dream as they pore over the dozens of plant and seed catalogs that have arrived in the mail. How else do we get through these last weeks of cold, slush, rain, and grey days?

OK, maybe ground hog Puxatawney Phil was a little optimistic for some parts of the country where the first day of Spring hid underneath the snowdrifts! If you're in a part of the country still in the deep freeze, you can get those seeds ordered and start them indoors; if you're lucky and you're in a more temperate location, get out and get those seeds in the ground!  

Backyard garden greens

Here in Seattle, we're on the lucky side and, while we've been harvesting winter and over-wintered greens (native, feral, and planted), we seeded a few cool weather plants over the weekend. Four kinds of peas (bush and vine), two varieties of spinach, and some mustard. Thank goodness they all wait patiently for the time when the soil gets above 40 at night! Oh, yes, and 75 new strawberry plants!

We're not alone in growing fruits and vegetables in our yard, the Garden Writers Association Foundation just released its 2013 Winter Gardening Trends Research Report, which shows that roughly 55.5 million American households have grown edible plants - fruits, vegetables, and herbs - since 2009. That number is expected to increase by 11.3% in 2013.

Did you know that gardeners now spend as much money to grow vegetables and fruits as they do for lawns, trees, shrubs and flowers? What a great way to guarantee your own food security!

Gardening not only provides a connection with nature, it connects us to our food. As more people are concerned about the provenance of their food - where it came from and how it was grown - gardening has given "local" a new meaning: "Zero Food Miles."

During both World Wars, families in the U.S. and Europe planted Victory Gardens; it was a time when everyone gardened. During World War I, as many as 5 million gardens were planted and during World War II the number grew to 20 million. In 2008, according to the National Gardening Association, 36 million households grew vegetables, fruits, berries and/or herbs in family or community gardens and 43 million planned a garden in 2009. Read more about Growing Your Own, and join us in the garden! 

If you can't grow your own, eating food produced by neighbors and friends is a close second!   

In a city where everyone seems to shop at one of the ten Seattle Farmers' Markets, one of the 11 natural food co-op stores, or one of three Whole Foods Markets, a chef can be challenged to deliver on his or her claim of local sourcing.

The good news: Stumbling Goat Bistro's Joshua Theilen has farmers, ranchers, cheesemakers, fishermen, and millers beating a path to his door. Stumbling Goat - a name that evolved from the title of Rimbaud's poem, "Drunken Boat" - has been in operation for about 12 years and the focus has always been on local food; suppliers come knocking.

Read more at: Local Sourcing is On Good Footing at Stumbling Goat Bistro. 

You'd have to have your head in the dirt to miss all the garden books in every bookstore and garden center, not to mention on the Internet. It's clearly Spring and the growing season!

This selection of seven books from the GoodFood World library has not been chosen to tell you how to design, construct, and grow your garden. They are to inspire your thinking, to get those creative juices flowing. It's a mixed (book) bag of reading material that offers the spirit of the garden from authors as varied as Japanese, Native American, and French. We've even included a book about a 17th century garden that is still producing food in England.

And if that's not enough,  here are five more timeless books that span a critical period in American agriculture - the 1880s through the early 1940s. Before the development of agro-chemicals as an off-shoot of chemicals used in both World Wars, farming methods were naturally "organic." These books, while considered somewhat dated today, are our grandfathers and great-grandfathers teaching us how to care for the land and animals.

There are more books on GoodFood World and more coming every week. Read, learn, and enjoy!

It's still way too cold to be digging around in the garden in Montana, but that doesn't stop Kate Hilmer, our Good Food on a Budget columnist, from heating up the oven and making homemade bread. Here's what  she has to say about it:

From the start I knew that this mission was all about incorporating whole grains. I want to bring bread back to the basics: handmade, unrefined (or less so), and healthy. Oh, and I want it to taste good too.  

Read about her successes - and, yes, failures - in Wheat Bread: A Baking Retrospective.