We Got a Garden After All!

After last year's ultimate garden failure I wasn't willing to give it another go - at least not in the same location.  Its proximity to a heavily wooded area brought with it wildlife so invasive that we were only able to harvest basil, hot peppers, a few leaves of kale and lettuce and a single bean.  Also, its 1.5 mile distance from our house, which seemed so agreeable initially, may as well have been in Ohio.  You see, there was no water source so we'd have to cart in our own each time we visited, an inconvenience of such magnitude that I began to quickly tire of the project.  I love growing my own food but longed for a space within view of my house.

For the past month or so I had the pleasure of being across-the-aisle neighbors with Mick and Maggie (and their darling daughters, Claire and Evelyn), of M&M Robertson Farms, who were selling transplant seedlings.  I'm not usually one to resist some red Russian kale (or white Russian, lacinato, rainbow lacinato, and Beedy's Camden, a variety I've never tried!), and I love supporting family farms so I purchased a few kales, a pear tomato plant, a cucumber vine and a flat of various marigolds (one of Olive's middle namesakes).  These I sat on our front steps where they got a pretty good amount of light.  Yesterday was Mick and Maggie's last day at the market so I snagged two more tomatoes, a salad variety whose name I forget and an indigo rose, whose inky stalk caught my attention.  Mick showed me a picture in the catalog of the dark, plum-like skin and flesh of the fruit.  He then asked if I liked kale.  DO I?  He sent me home with an entire flat of seedlings.

When I got home I surveyed with doubt the dwindling real estate of our front steps.  These sweetlings needed a true home.  Then this morning, while looking out our bedroom window that faces the south, a window whose light breathed life back into our flourishing fig and continues to nurture Precious Junior, our rubber plant, it hit me.  Why not make use of the strip of yard that gets so little use, save for the Hoop Union, the hula hooping group that congregates there on Wednesday evenings.  I grabbed my tiller and spent Olive's nap time clearing a wide row nearly half the length of our house.  I kept it close so as not to encroach on Union Project grounds, though I was told that twenty feet of the lawn was ours.  I scattered last year's food scrap compost (a more vicious odor I don't think I've encountered) and mixed it with the soil, then sunk each pod into the earth.   My only regret is that I didn't think of this two months ago.  There's always next year.

Stay tuned for pictures!