Experimental Phase

This year is a first for us-- our first attempt to have a vegetable garden. Before we have grown a few patio tomatoes, and I love potted herbs, but this year we are doing the real thing. Sort of a modified square foot gardening model.

The thing is, it almost didn't happen. Like many homeowners, there are just so many dollars and so much time and energy to put into home projects. While we continue to tweak things indoors, we are rescuing our yard. Around our L-shaped ranch are various boxwoods and hollies, untended for two decades, scraggly above red clay that washes up on the foundation with every rain. Last year we reclaimed a few precious feet, with gravel and mulch, with new healthy shrubs, after creating a mountain of trimmings and digging out huge stumps.

This year, we had planned to garden, but continuing with the project we had begun was looking more and more attractive. Hours and dollars made it an either/or.

And then the first seed catalog came, with the only snow we saw this winter. The boys pounced on it before I could, and in their imaginations a wondrous garden took root-- filled with magical things like sugar pumpkins and baby carrots and sunflowers swaying over all like benevolent sentries. The decision was made and we ordered a great load of dirt, started making our beds, reused some fencing, and started some seeds inside.

As any of you with kids and a garden know, it is already worth it. Their wonder as green split seed and earth by our sunny window, their delight as vines creep upward and rosebuds burst into bloom has more than made up for our homely foundation beds. There will be time later for tasteful ground cover, for the hydrangea hedge at the border and peonies along the driveway. This is now. Their dirty fingers are still small and a little stubby, and they get it, on some level we can only approximate as adults.

So far we have had a few salads from the lettuce bed. The tomatoes are blooming and I am looking over the pepper plants and dreaming of July fajitas. My few roses, moved to make room for the garden, are flourishing in their new homes and putting on an early show. And every morning Sam wants to go check out the garden, survey his plot and check for growth, equally thrilled with rose and marigold.

We don't totally know what we're doing. But on some level, it is already a success.