From the Beginning

As most of you know I have started my garden at a Community Garden. Most of this time I have been doing nothing but pulling weeds and sifting through the compost piles. This is a journal of the ups and downs of gardening.

The bed I am renting was full of weeds. I am not sure if most community gardens are set up this way but i kind of liked it. It is hard, yet refreshing work to know that I started this garden from scratch. It was absolutely hard work!

I showed up first there on a Saturday morning for a meeting of the gardeners, turns out there weren't as many of us as I had thought, there were only three other ladies there and I was the youngext by a good 30 years. It felt a little odd. Are there no young people that enjoy gardening? I found out that thus far they had only rented out 5 of the 18 spaces. Thus the small group. We went over out hopes, expectations and of course rules of the garden.

This is when the fun part began we headed out to the beds to try and get them into some sort of shape. There was a bed next to mine that looked just as bad, full of rocks and weeds, so it was decided we would work on mine and see how manageable we could get the weeds in the side bed.

Thinking it would be nice if it got rented and the new gardener wouldn't have to deal with as many weeds as I had to. The weeds weren't the biggest problem here though - the ground was so hard and so rocky it was hard to get them yanked out and to get rid of all the rocks. Thankfully I had the help of the head gardener as well as the sporadic help of my two monkeys. We used the borrowed shovel as well as buckets they conveniently had place everywhere.

After a few hours in the garden - I think about 4 we got all the weeds out, ok well most of the weeds, we were working with shovels and hands only here no nifty claw device or anything like that. so we got out the majority - leaving a few stubborn ones behind.

What a long exhausting day! The only reason I had went home so soon was because the kids were hungry. I was so naive about all the work involved in that bed that I had thought I would be able to escort some of my liners down that day to be planted. That was to be saved for another day. That Saturday all I wanted to do was take a cold shower - it was bloody hot out there - and sit by the pool as the kids found new ways to dangerously jump in.