homegrown 2018

“Greens green and nothing but green! Parsley, peppers, cabbages, and celery. asparagus and watercress and fiddlefern and lettuce.” 

This past week I’ve been dancing around singing this song as my mantra like the witch from Into The Woods as I’ve watched my garden slowly, turning from flat, brown, earth to little green bumps of sprouting love, and I don’t care who hears me! Springtime is one of my favorite seasons, for a long list of reasons…

My birthday
No more snow
Baby animals ALL OVER THE PLACE
The bright colors!
The smell of lilac bushes and magnolia trees
Gardening…

I could go on, and on, and on… but I’m really here to talk about gardens today. Though, I tend to ramble a bit, so who knows, I might decide to write about how much I dislike ducks, we shall see.

I love the planning part of gardening: all the plotting, organizing, buying of seeds, new gloves, and shiny new tools (we need new ones each year, right?). I can honestly say that I love it all. There comes a time each year when I get so silly excited about what we are going to plant that I’m fairly positive that my husband tunes me out as soon as he hears me mention a vegetable name.

I have planted and grown a version of a garden every year of my life for as long as I can remember. Living in apartments never stopped me, I tried the upside-down hanging planters, the large pots of soil, and once I even hauled in dirt by the bucket load and created a 2 foot deep, raised bed garden on my small patio.

When I finally had a few square yards to scratch the soil, I thought I was in heaven! The possibilities were endless! That year I had tomatoes growing out of my ears, and I couldn’t have been happier. We only lived in that place for a few months before we moved out the place that we so aptly call our Perfectly Askew Farm, and thats when my roots really took to the soil.

I had more space than I had ever imagined would be available to me! What to plant? Where to start? Luckily, I had help!