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From Sacramento to Potomac: Tales of Two Valleys is our name for a blogging space in which we’ve been writing since 2016. From then until July 2022, we wrote about our Sacramento Valley kitchen garden and the cooking (and eating) we did there that includes using produce from the garden. All our California entries until July 2022 are still in the blog and we invite you to read them. (They help us remember our very happy lives there.)

But, starting August, 2022, the blog became for us a space to write about our new lives in Northern Virginia–the Potomac Valley–where we lived for many years before our move to the West–and to which we returned in order to be much closer to our East Coast children and grandchildren. Hence the new title for the blog, much changed from the former title, which was A Sacramento Valley Kitchen Garden.

Sacramento Valley, California, Blog: 2016-July 2022

Our California garden, begun in 2007, was always a work in progress, an ongoing learning opportunity.  Together, what we did was not much different from what millions of other families do when we use the available space to grow things that we then turn into food for ourselves and others. The “others,” by the way, included not only other humans such as neighbors, friends, and relatives, but also the birds, bees, butterflies, and other citizens that flew into the garden most days to nibble or drink whatever is on the menu and the creepy crawlers that clamber through the undergrowth or up through the dirt to do their own nibbling.

The space where we grew our veggies, fruit, shade trees, flowers, bushes, and herbs was along one side and the back of the house in which we lived until 2022–about 2000 square feet of garden in total, give or take a couple hundred, in a rough L shape.

The most recent monarch we saw in our California garden, 2014

Jean’s peach pie and peach ice cream, both made with our Sacramento Valley peaches

Potomac Valley Blog, August 2022 to Present

Since we moved to Northern Virginia in July 2022, the character of the blog has changed. We no longer have a large garden space around our home. We now live in a densely-peopled semi-urban apartment community, so the comparatively little gardening we can do challenges us to grow via pots or small patches–and in a Mid-Atlantic climate far different from that of Northern California. But we live in a community with many diverse cultural riches, including many cuisines into which we have immersed ourselves.

A Mid-November Still Life in the Rain in Our Northern Virginia Community

Yet, our community is also close to natural riches, as the photo of the heron that begins this section suggests. The little lake and surrounding woods in our community have proven to have surprising diversity in wildlife, as you’ll see when you read our entries and view all the photos and videos of birds, wildflowers, butterflies, and many other citizens. And our recent travels have already taken us to fascinating locales in–and beyond–the widespread and historically rich Potomac Valley. So our entries always try to capture this diverse richness of people, places, arts, cuisines, flora, and fauna. We invite you to join us in our adventure.

Oh, and many of our entries still try to capture events in our former state, which we continue to learn about and love. There’s lots to compare between Virginia and California.