A Newer Beginning

I woke up one day a couple weekends ago to find my boyfriend MIA. This was not of great concern to me as I was tired, and it was the weekend. Though after a few minutes of debating whether to laze about in bed or not I decided to go out back and greet him with morning breath and all. Not only was he not sitting on the back porch, he was in the yard moving the earth, FOR ME!
I knew I had found a good guy prior to this, but this confirmed my beliefs even more. I have heard people say "I love you so much I would move heaven and earth for you!" but I have never seen it in action before. I am sure at this point if I asked him to he would try and find a way to move the heavens for me as well.
My love knows how much I loved being in my garden and outside "playing in the dirt" and how much I have been missing it, so he decided to do something about it. He has taken a corner of the yard and is progressively getting it ready for us to have a garden out there. He has spent countless hours clearing the area, pulling weeds, and prepping the dirt.
This weekend there are plans to put down chicken wire to keep the gophers from digging up from underneath and ruining our plans of a beautiful garden. I am excited as I will have a garden I can go out to when I am feeling up to it, and if not I have quite a few hands available that I am sure will be willing to help.
In the side yard the kids also have a couple raised garden beds they are going to use to start their own gardens in.
This is so exciting for me to have everyone involved in something I love to do so much, and to have a replacement garden for the one I am having to give up. I already have a few seedlings yearning to stretch.

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.