A modern victory garden and a love for old architecture. 

While I was growing up in a little Ohio town, the love for growing and preserving food was slowly seeping into my mind at a young age.  Summers were a time when Aunts and cousins gathered at my Grandparents' garden and orchard to pick, gather and husk the wonderful things they had grown.  It was in these moments I realized the feeling of reaping the benefits of hard labor in its truest form. When you garden you are experiencing how to be patient, changing of the seasons, working for a result that is not immediate yet worth the wait and the pride of that result. Soon after I got married and moved to Indiana I was getting interested in bringing this part of my childhood with me and start my own gardening experience.  

It was through this that I read up on Victory Gardens. During a time when our country was calling each individual to do his or her part, a victory garden was a way to provide for your family while aiding your country.  The US created a campaign that instilled the need for gardening in Americans, to get their hands dirty, create change in their own backyards. Victory gardens were a moral booster as much as they were a way to take the pressure off of public food sources. While I was adjusting to growing up, being married, and being away from the only town I had ever lived in, I found my own kind of victory garden to boost my moral.  In a tiny six foot by four foot raised garden I created a piece of my childhood and started a future passion. 

The other half of my life that is not spend in the garden is consumed by architecture and design.  During the day I am an art teacher at a public school, trying my best to prove to 450 students that art can be anything from a passion to a solid income. Nights and weekends I work with my husband fixing up our 1870's northern Indiana home room by room.  There is so much to say about a time when nothing was bought from a company that was massed produced, but everything came from your pantry door or the food in your cellar was made or grown by hand and that was valued. Exploring the history of an old home is a way for me to get a glimpse of a time when life revolved around that cycle of plant, harvest,  preserve and enjoy. 

My goal for this blog is to bring back some of that respect and love for a time when value was placed on a skill that had to be learned, a product that took time to create, and meal that was grown in our own back yard. 

• Contact me at cellarandconservatory@gmail.com