It's been a while since I posted and it all has to do with the garden (not entirely, I've also found that having a steady job cuts into my free time fairly severely, but it's nice to have an excuse). This is the time of year that my lovely rectangle of soil and weeds begins to whisper to me at all times, day and night. This was, I think the driest March on record which afforded us wonderful days of bike riding at the park, but fewer days of comfortable procrastination from the garden.

Severe winds back in January and February tore up all the landscape fabric I had worked so diligently to lay down after first scraping the ground below free of weeds. My goal last summer was to re-fence and decrease the weeds and Tom was so amazing at making the former happen. I wanted to reduce the weeds around the garden and create walkways that would make the entire garden more accessible and friendly. I worked so hard at getting the fabric laid down, even scouring Costco for one last roll of landscape fabric they swore was somewhere inside based on the computer inventory check. Ryan was having a pretty bad go of it with the cancer last summer, and I meticulously picked out every last bit of Johnson grass, each segment of evil replicating root, imagining the entire time I was picking out evil tumor after evil tumor from his body. It was incredibly theraputic (for me - and the garden). Of course this year, the evil f-ing bermuda grass is stealthily creeping in from the opposite side...

So, last weekend I set about to really get the fabric down and immovable. (I have dreams of pea gravel covering the pathways, more on that later.) Tom had a bunch of 10-20# rocks he was taking to store on a far corner of the property a few months ago and I had him drop them in the garden instead. So the fabric now has the staples and tacks in it, but also a pretty solid chunk of igneous material keeping it in place every few feet. Getting it to that state was pretty humorous. With a sigh, the weekend before last (the weekend before that spent at a "work party" for my friends Spencer and Sarah) Tom and I realized that summer was much closer than we'd hoped - it can swing a month or so either way every year, there have been Junes when we've been hunkered down next to the fireplace, dripping raincoats by the door, and Mays where we've watered the lawn. Not Aprils, to my memory - til now. So he fired up thow mower and the weedeater and I fired up myself and the kids for a day in the garden.

Firing up teh kids is an interesting thing. I want them involved in the garden, want them to love the dirt beneath their fingertips, joyous in finding a rip cucumber beneath a perfect green leaf, happy to don hats and boots and slide down the rows of vegetables eating carrots fresh from the dirt, exorcising weeds from the garden. But, what takes an hour with disinterested tv-watching kids kept at bay on the couch takes three times that long with dirty, healthy kids. Jordan adores worms. Roly-poly bugs, too, but worms most of all. Tom dug up an area of lawn near the back porch to landscape, and emptying out a wheelbarrow of pulled weeds, I discovered the soil was rich with worms. Jordan set about rescuing them from the backyard and carrying them to the garden. SHe of course needed help turning hte dirt, gaining the pateince to watch the earth move and discover the worms, find an appropriate worm-carrying bucket, and so on. Then Sawyer woke up from his nap and got in on the action. Forty minutes later I was back laying the fabric down and looked up after too quiet a period and realized the children were inside. And the buckets were, too - Sawyer having filled his with sand from teh sand box so eh could be like his big sister who had hers filled with worms and dirt. Sawyer had a few worms, too. One less than when he began as he'd held up two pieces and told me in his special little version of pidgin English "It bwoken, Mama." As I lay down my tools and headed toward the house, Jordan appeared on the porch yelling "Mama! Sawyer dumped his bucket out on the capet!" And indeed he had. Dumped it, then spread it around - no doubt choosing the carpet as his sister had coopted the table where she'd dumped out her bucket and spread around it's contents. And so began the no worms/dirt/buckets in the house rule.

After vacuuming, I situated them on the porch with a birdhouse painting activity, and got another thirty-five minutes or so in the garden until I noticed, once again, that the porch was empty. Sawyer was in hte bathroom and if he had only used red paint it would have looked like the scene of a horrific murder. As he used at leat fifteen colors of paint, it looked like the entire cast of The Muppet SHow had been systematically dismembered and chopped into pieces in the tiny room. And so on... We're excited to get to seeds. Outside. And I'm hoping the cool weather holds a few weeks more - Jordan is so warm all the time - she said it's what drove her indoors last weekend. Every morning she wakes up naked (she never lasts a faull night in jammies) and comes out to teh living room. all winter the house averages a cool 50-55 degrees first thing, and she is immune. I'm guessing it's due in large part to the 25% of her that is Icelandic. Because it sure didn't come from my side of the family. If it's cool, she'll stay out there for hours - Sawyer, too - and we need that time as this project has only just begun...

Mondays are my days off. Last Monday was my birthday and after a wonderful day of picnicing and hiking with friends, I got an hour or two of uninterrupted garden time before my wonderful family showed up in the pickup truck, bearing gifts! My favorite and most original was the half yard of pea gravel in the back of the truck. I'd mentioned to Tom that my ideal pathway material would be pea gravel, and he got me the trial half-yard (the max our pickup can handle). I love it! It'll take a good five to seven yeards to cover the rest of the garden which is a lot more loads in the truck, but it's worth it. Adios, weeds.

It was blazing hot this weekend and I didn't get out much to the garden as Saturday was given to a birthday party and another "work party" and Sunday was a "tax party" at a friend's after a mid-day massage I'd scheduled for a new client. Today I was back out there, weeding a bit more, clearing the weeds from a borrowed rototiller which reminded me of unwinding hair from a vacuum cleaner we loaned to our upstairs tenant. After putting the kids to bed, I went back out for the last few minutes of daylight and worked into darkness, a two-thirds moon offering enough light to identify border weeds that escaped the tiller but not illuminating any spiders or other pests, a lovely effect! It was windy and cooler today, and the dust that raking the weeds kicked up was disappointing, Grapes of Wrath in mind as the hills go slowly and much too early to brown around us. But it is blissful, being in the garden. I love working the soil, planting the seeds and waiting for the first green nibs to reach for the sun. I love that progress is evident week to week, that my children know how much hard work goes into each bite they take. Focusing on weed eradication (not making thigs grow) and growing very little last year was soemwhat painful for me. I grew a bunch of hot peppers, actually - mislabeled starts at the nursery yielded three or four lants of spicy jalapenos and such rather than sweet bells for the kids to enjoy, but they made for outstanding pico de gallo which we consumed by the half gallon every week.

I am so antsy to get my little seeds in the ground, the small yellow tips at the end of black irrigation tubing like a nursing mothers breast above them, everything in sync. Last summer when I got plantar fascitis I could work on my knees and be pain-free. Two summer before I was near bursting with Sawyer and loved being in the garden with Jordan although the raking and hoeing were not so good on my back. Claiming the garden when we moved in five years ago reminded me I had my space, empowered me in the huge decision to take on thirty years of debt - I wasn't buying just a house but also the land; earth from which I could plant and pull food for my family. We talk about the cost of putting in the garden every year and I am trying to get a system down to where it is cost-effective. We put money into fencing, landscape material, a compost bin. As weeds are less of a problem, the garden will be easier and easier to manage each year. I have read so many gardening books, know so much more than I did when we began, but am stunned by how much more there is to learn. But I love every moment of it, every blister, callous, every month of brown fingernails. I grow my spirit in the garden - the rest is pure gravy.