New Beginnings

Every morning before work and every evening when I arrive home, I check on my garden. On the weekends, I find myself checking up on it a few times a day or just standing at the back door staring at the plants. It’s kind of an obsession. Since I’ve become a homeowner, I’ve come to resent the time and money spent in yard care. For what? Green grass that I’m very allergic to and can’t enjoy? Trees that make me sneeze uncontrollably? We should get something in return, darn it. Make our plants work for us.

When we decided to move to a new house last winter, I begged Dave to have a garden. He was very skeptical at first because I tend to have grandiose ideas and abandon them after a couple weeks when I get bored or distracted by a new, shinier idea. But now that we had a home with full sunlight all day long, I decided it was time to start our garden (and for him to do most of the hard work).

Dave hard at work...see how happy he is?!?!

Luckily Sasha is great supervisor/inspector.

We had to take out all the ugly bushes that came with the house.

But we had some good helpers.

This is our second year having a vegetable garden, but our first fall/winter garden. We’ve had so much fun with our summer gardens, we decided to take on the challenge of cool weather gardening. We are very lucky to live in Northern California where we have very mild winters that rarely dip below freezing, allowing us to grow a variety of cool weather crops.

After doing some reading and chatting with some “experts”, I discovered that many of the winter veggies are best planted from seed. So different from going to the nursery in the springtime, picking out the right plants, and sticking it in the ground, and immediately watching it grow. Seeds are so blah. You stick it in the dirt and wait. And wait. And wait. And then you wait some more. And I'm the least patient people in the world, I want to see results NOW. So for the first week after planting, I went out there morning and night and looked at dirt. And bare dirt makes me sad. Then one day, in the early morning, I saw a tiny little sprout, barely sticking up out of the ground. I really hoped it wasn’t a weed. By the time, I got home from work, there were dozens of tiny sprouts popping up all over the place.

Now a couple weeks later, the sprouts are turning into tiny little plants, growing bigger every day. In a couple weeks, we will be harvesting our first radishes of the season. I'm so very excited!

And I'm very glad that Sheriff Daisy will be there to guard them.