there is a whole different kind of creativity that has called me for a long time now--an impulse to live the life i have now more fully, to embrace with enthusiasm the being at home-ness that is my life today. it is very different from the chase i have been in all the previous years of my life--and yet being in it, right in it, i have learned how much there is in this kind of life to appeal to the one thing in me that is consistent across all times and places: my urge to bring something new to life and by doing so, to bring something special to the lives of others.
this year, it lead me to do something i've wanted to do for almost 20 years--i've started a square foot garden. my wildly-ambitious intention is to provide my family with daily fresh veggies during the summer and hopefully preserving the excess to help provide for us over the winter--all the while spending time in touch with the child and the land we have been so generously blessed with.
what finally convinced me that this was the year i could make it happen was a post on the wonderful blog little house in the suburbs--it was a plan for a beginner's garden that could be planted in a day. that sounded manageable, and i set out to find what i needed to make this miracle garden happen. within a few days i had been given or had traded for nearly everything i needed for the garden--boards to make the raised beds, ready-to-plant seedlings, and even some compost. i had seeds saved from past failed attempts to garden in the backyard that time forgot, and i bought some "fencing" to hopefully keep out the dog that will not be taught. in just four hours and with some help from rudi and ella, i had not one but two square foot gardens all done. we put the gardens in the front yard, which is the only place in our yard that gets enough sun.
this is the beginner garden, but i'm calling it my italian garden because if all goes as planned, we'll have pasta sauce and pesto sauce and pizza sauce and who knows what other saucy things as well:
this is the squash garden, which i briefly called the squashed garden (you'll understand why in a moment):
we finished them last wednesday, around 4pm.
at around 4:30pm our dog sprinkles, who i love in theory but who i have a "difficult" relationship with in practice, completely trampled the squash garden and scattered the seeds of most of it. i was so angry that i threatened every kind of awful thing and scared ella to tears for love of her pet and learned the first lesson in gardening humility which i will write about on my other blog because it doesn't carry this story along. :) ella and i did our best to get things back to the way they were, we propped up the broken plants with mounds of dirt and tried to find every little radish seed and every little chard seed and put them back in their rightful place, and then we folded our hands and prayed, right there in the garden, that our little babies would be ok.
the next day, i read a recent post by a friend of mine who lives more or less completely off the land, in which she said she believes you can plant early or you can plant late, but everything still seems to come up at about the same time, so i felt ok that i hadn't gotten the early start that most gardening experts suggest. ella and i have gone out every day to water each plant and seed by hand, carefully, so as not to disturb them.
this is what the gardens looked like yesterday, around 4pm, 7 full days since we planted them:
italian garden:
squash garden--it's alive!
don't be fooled by all the "open space"--there's so much going on, i can barely believe it:
do you know what that is??? that's the beginning of a pumpkin patch!!! and look, there's a forest of bush beans!!! ella calls these praying beans, because when they emerge they look like they have their heads down and hands folded in prayer:
and there are pole beans too, with sunflowers in the middle for them to climb (i didn't have corn to plant which the garden plan called for, but i always have sunflower seeds), and already, in just seven days, there are little baby tomato flowers!
and get ready to "aw", there are even tiny little chardlings with tiny red stems:
i am SO SO SO EXCITED!!! i am forever indebted to little house in the suburbs for generously giving the world these simple garden plans for those of us who don't have the know-how to do it on our own. thanks to her, i have a chance of success. please go visit her blog and give her your undivided attention, you will be glad you did.
today, as i look over my little gardens and see yet another version of the miracle of life unfolding right in my own yard, i am puffed up with a feeling that is very close to self-respect. if i can shepherd that little pumpkin seed all the way to the jack-o-lantern stage, i will feel like superwoman!!!
