Watching the plants grow.

My garden is getting big. The green beans are six inches tall, with the zinnias and cosmos not far behind. The nasturtiums look like some kind of mini Dr. Seuss umbrella plants. Everything seems really happy, with the exception of one of the Red Pearl tomatoes, which I think got nibbled by something and only has one tiny little leaf so far. But it's still growing, so I'm just going to wait and see what happens.

So everything is doing great. And yet, it's not quite exciting now as it was a week or two ago. Satisfying, yes, and still magical, but not quite as exciting. Now when the green beans grow an inch in one day, it doesn't mean they've doubled in size like it did when they first emerged, so I don't notice it as much now. I still find myself walking to the kitchen window to stare at the little plants several times a day, but now its more just to enjoy the sight of them, instead of looking for new growth.

And then there's the mint and thyme, the only two plants that have yet to sprout. I think the mint just didn't germinate for whatever reason, and a few days ago I planted some new seeds. But the thyme takes such a long time to germinate, I can't tell if it's just late, or if I should start again. According to the seed packet, I've just gotten in to the time frame that it's expected to come up. I think, though, if it doesn't come up soon, I'm going to try starting it and the mint in pots, where I can keep a closer eye on them and make sure they're ok. Both have such incredibly tiny seeds and need to be so close to the surface of the soil that I wonder if they just got pushed too deep by the rain or got washed away. So we'll see. I haven't given up yet!

There was one cool new thing that I noticed last week: the garden is moving now. I don't mean that it got up and is walking around (though that would be kind of cool...), but that some of the plants are now big enough to wiggle in the breeze. When all the seedlings were tiny, they didn't really move much, even in the middle of a thunderstorm. But last week I was sitting and watching them, and I noticed that the leaves of the green beans and the zinnias were moving gently when the wind touched them. I don't know why, really, but it struck me as a kind of milestone. They look more alive now. When I peek at them from the kitchen window, it looks like they're waving at me.

"Hi Disa!"

My ABC's are all up now, too. The arugula was first, followed a couple of days later by the sweet basil. The cilantro just came up this morning. I think it's kind of funny that they came up in alphabetical order...

I have an arugula fairy ring!

The little basil sprouts are so familiar to me. Ever since I was tiny, the beginning of summer has been marked by trays and trays of tiny basil plants being readied for planting in my Dad's field. In the seed starting trays he uses, they're so densely packed that they look like moss from a distance. Now I have my own little bunch!

Alex's Dad is here visiting us from Wisconsin. Yesterday he came home from his exploring with a pack of yellow marigolds for me! They're really pretty, and will look really nice with the red marigolds already planted in the garden. Thanks, David!

Yesterday morning I went outside at dawn to look at the garden, and I noticed that the young nasturtiums trap the dew on their leaves in really interesting ways. The water forms perfect little beads that sit delicately at the very edges of the leaves. I spent way too much time taking pictures of them, trying to capture a bit of the magic. Here's some of what I took.

That's all for now! Thanks for being on this adventure with me!

Garden Therapy.

The world is a scary place sometimes. There are lots of things that scare me, including North Korea, brown recluse spiders, tornadoes, American politics, and the fact that my boyfriend is in the military. Yesterday, the world seemed scarier than usual, so, as has become my habit when I'm unhappy, I went outside and sat by the garden, drinking in the sight and feel of living, growing, beautiful things. I honestly think that they're nurturing me just as much as I'm nurturing them. Garden therapy.

I also finally got around to planting my ABC's (arugula, basil, and cilantro). For some reason it had taken me a while to get around to actually filling up the pots and putting in the seeds, but it was ok, because I really needed something simple and comforting and life-giving to do yesterday. There are now so many potted plants on the back step that it almost doesn't function as a way of getting in and out of the house.

The ABC's (from left to right: Arugula, Basil, Cilantro)

The rest of the garden is growing like mad. We had a lot of rain last week, including several days with rainfall amounts of more than one inch. I was worried that the fairly torrential downpour would hurt the fragile-looking baby plants, and the first night it stormed I ventured out twice in my pajamas with a flashlight and an umbrella to check on them. But they actually fared better than my bucket of pansies, who seemed to be living up to their name and got all droopy and sad looking for a day or so after the downpour. (They're better now, don't worry.)

Then yesterday the sun came out, and that combined with well-watered soil makes for happy plants. The peppers have finally emerged, as has the sage. I'm almost positive that the nasturtiums all grew at least a half inch yesterday while I was out running errands. I also finally accepted that my Amish Paste tomato seed probably didn't germinate, so I planted a few new ones, and hopefully these will do better.

Nasturtiums, with the zinnias in the background.

The green beans don't look like monsters anymore.

Cosmos

Earl, the early zinnia that was the first seedling to come up.

Then, as I was threading my way through the potted plants on the steps after taking the above pictures, I found this guy:

He was sitting on the cooler by the back door. I'm assuming it was a he, because he did this:

Just one more beautiful thing in life to appreciate.

Attack of the baby green bean monsters.

On Tuesday morning, I had no green beans. This is what I saw in my garden this morning, just two days later:

They came out of the ground so fast, I'm pretty sure I could actually see them growing right before my eyes. They are now by far the biggest plants in my garden, despite the fact that they're the most recent ones to emerge.

When they first came up, I thought they looked like the sarlacc monster from Star Wars, the one Jabba the Hutt tries to feed Han Solo and Luke to. (Alex and I just watched all the old Star Wars movies...) Unfortunately, because my little beans are growing so quickly, I missed getting a picture of them in full sarlacc stage, but you can still kind of see the resemblance:

Behold the mighty Sarlacc! Obviously this picture does not belong to me.

See what I mean? That's why I'm calling them my little green bean monsters.

The rest of my plant babies are doing great, too. My early birds, the cosmos, zinnias, and marigolds, are just starting to put out their first set of true leaves. The anise hyssop just came up yesterday, as did one of my three nasturtiums. The only ones I'm still waiting on are the sage, thyme, mint, bell peppers, and the Amish Paste tomato. I'm not too worried about the herbs, since their seed packets say that they can take a long time to germinate, but I'm starting to get impatient for the peppers and tomato. The Red Pearl tomatoes just came up yesterday, but there's still no sign of the Amish Paste. Hmmm...

I don't know about you, but I think tiny plants are really cute, so here's the current batch of baby pictures:

Cosmos

Borage

Anise Hyssop (these ones are so tiny, I almost missed them!)

Marigold

Zinnia

Red Pearl Tomato (YARR!)

Nasturtium

Lemon Basil (so cute!)

I'm pretty sure this one is a weed, but it looks interesting. I wonder what it is?

 There are still a few things destined for life in terracotta pots that I have yet to plant, namely the arugula, sweet basil, and cilantro. And the morning glories. All right, all right, I'll admit: I did buy one of those pretty seed packets with the big colorful pictures that they sell at the hardware store, the ones that I coveted over the plain white Johnny's ones when I was little. They're just too pretty! And I really did want something that would climb on the porch railing and roof supports. I've always loved morning glories, so when I was at the hardware store last time and saw those brightly colored packets sitting in their neat display, I snagged one.

I remembered that when my Mom and I grew these when I was little, we nicked the seeds with a knife and soaked them in water over night to help them germinate. In my memory, this was a simple process, but in retrospect, that may have been because I was too little to be the one wielding the knife. Yesterday morning I spent several minutes nearly cutting off my fingers and sending seeds flying all over the kitchen, succeeding only in nicking one seed and cutting several more nearly in half. Either these seeds are much smaller than the ones in my memory, or they have harder shells, or my Mom is even more of a super hero than I already knew. In frustration, I turned to the internet, and discovered a useful tip. Some people recommended that instead of nicking the seeds, you just shave off a bit of the hard outer shell with a file. After raiding Alex's toolbox, I discovered that this is indeed a much easier way to go about it. Now, after soaking over night, the seeds are starting to sprout and ready to be planted!

You can see the one I nearly cut in half...

I love having a garden. I love watching it grow, and taking care of it, and anticipating what it will look like in a few days or weeks or months. I wonder how long it will be before I cut my first bouquet, or eat my first green bean? I check the weather obsessively, worrying about if it will get too cold, or rain too hard. Plants are hard because you can't just pick them up and bring them inside when the weather gets bad. But it's worth it, to be able to see up close how amazing everything is. And I guess this is good practice, for when I have an even bigger garden some day, one that can last for more than just one year. Yes, I'm still daydreaming. Of course I am! That's half the fun, isn't it?

"It wasn't a dream!"

That's right folks, already some of my little plant-babies have bravely stuck their heads up out of the dirt and into the sunshine. Doesn't it look happy? Like it's shouting, "Yay! Here I am!"

Have you ever seen the movie, "My Neighbor Totoro"? If not, you should, because it's wonderful and magical and adorable. At one of my favorite points in the movie, the two little girls who are the main characters are given a bundle of magic seeds and acorns, which they plant in the yard. Over the next several days, they check them obsessively, trying to see if they're growing. Nothing happens until one night, the girls have a dream (or was it a dream?) that their magic seeds grow into a huge tree. The next morning when they wake up, the tree is gone, but the seeds have indeed sprouted and started to grow. The girls are ecstatic, and they dance around shouting "It was only a dream!" and "It wasn't a dream!"

I mention this because I feel like I'm living it right now. I, too, have been obsessively checking my garden since planting the seeds this last Tuesday. Even though I knew it would take several days, maybe even a week, before I saw anything sprout, I couldn't help but worry every time I checked on them and found nothing. What if I planted them too deep? What if they don't germinate because it's not warm enough? What if that rain storm washed them away, or scrambled them all up?

Then, two nights ago, I dreamed about my garden, about it sprouting and growing. Just like in the movie, my dream garden grew tall and bloomed right before my eyes. And then I woke up. But again, like the movie, when I went outside first thing in the morning to check on the garden and give it some water, I found that my dream had come true, at least partially. One of the zinnias had sprouted!

I knew it was a zinnia because it was wearing its little 'seed hat,' which I recognized from planting it four days ago. Four days! That's it! Amazing. It seemed like forever, while I was waiting for them, but when I actually stop and think about it, that is amazingly fast.

That day several more seedlings broke through the surface: a few cosmos, another zinnia, and most of the marigolds. Today, they've been joined by even more, and now nearly all the seedlings of those three flowers have come up. Everything else is still hiding, and those worries I had before haven't gone away completely, but it's so exciting to see the little baby flowers starting to grow. If anything, I'm checking them even more obsessively now than I did before, and every time they seem bigger.

Isn't life amazing?

YAY!

The garden is planted! The garden is planted! THE GARDEN IS PLANTED!

...can you tell I'm excited?

I shoveled a lot of dirt yesterday. I'm not exactly sure how much a cubic foot weighs, but I'm willing to guess I moved several hundred pounds from my truck to the beds. Luckily, it was a gorgeous day, and I was too happy to mind the work. And it really wasn't that bad. Several hundred pounds moves surprisingly quickly if you just take it one shovel-full at a time.

Turns out Steve the dirt guy was right about me needing to come back; I hadn't gotten quite enough topsoil on Monday. I was able to fill two of the beds completely and got a little into the third before I ran out. I hadn't been off by too much, but I still needed more, and this would give me a chance to pay for it all. Back I went to Steve's lot, shovel in hand.

My strategy for filling the beds was to start with some topsoil, then pour in some compost and mix the two together. I kept going like that, with the compost getting more concentrated towards the top of the bed, until it was full. For the last bed, I decided to mix that last layer of soil and compost with my hands, instead of with the rake and shovel. It was late afternoon, the sun was hot on my back, and the soil was cool and damp in my hands. I reached down to my wrists in the soft dirt, then scooped it up and turned it over to mix everything together. Before I finished, I just stood there for a moment, my hands buried like I was going to put down roots myself. It felt so soft and rich and nice; I think my plants will really like it.

Filled with love.

When the last bed was filled, I stood there in amazement for a few minutes. Was it really time? I've been daydreaming about having a real garden for ages and ages, since I don't know when. Almost everywhere I've gone since leaving home, I've picked up plants along the way. I had a basil plant and a bedraggled sunflower that I carted around with me when I was on tour in the UK. I had my sunlight-deprived primrose and dahlias in Philadelphia. And now this: three neat square beds filled with rich, dark earth, just waiting for me to fill them up. I almost couldn't believe it was real!

I started by dividing each bed into nine one-foot squares with twine. While I'm not technically following the square-foot gardening practices completely, I am borrowing some of it's ideas. This seemed like the easiest way to organize my garden and start things out neat, plus it will make weeding easier, should that become an issue. (I'm hoping the newspaper I put at the bottom of the beds, as well as our general lack of grass, will make for minimal weeds. This might be wishful thinking.)

Part of the afternoon, while I was waiting to go pick up more topsoil, had been spent rearranging the garden layout that I'd planned when I bought seeds. I decided that it probably really was too late in the season to plant my peas and carrots. They'll just have to wait for the fall, along with the still-theoretical kale, brussels sprouts, and bachelor's buttons I'd like to plant then as well. So instead, I added another square of green beans, a third tomato plant, and more flowers. (One can never have too many flowers.) Now, with my garden plan sketched out in my notebook and the box of seeds under my arm, I was ready to go.

It seems like such a simple thing: poke a hole of the appropriate depth into the dirt, drop in a seed or two, and cover it back up again (or not, depending on the plant). After all that anticipation, it was so easy and quick. But it felt magical. I looked at the little seeds in my hand and tried to imagine the plants they'd grow into. Some of them, especially the anise hyssop, mint, and thyme seeds, seemed so impossibly small. How could a big bushy plant grow out of something so tiny? The mint seeds were so small that when I poured them into my hands, I couldn't tell which little black specks were seeds and which were grains of dirt.

Some of the others surprised me as well. The nasturtium seeds, for example, were much bigger than I'd thought they'd be and looked like knobbily brains the size of my little fingernail. And then there were some, like the cosmos, zinnia, and marigold seeds, that I recognized from planting them with my Mom when I was little. It was like meeting old friends again: "Hello there! How are you? It's been a while, hasn't it? It's good to see you again."

I love that different varieties of plants have names, some more fantastical than others. Here's what I'm growing, fun names included:

• Nasturtiums - Kaleidoscope Mix
• Marigolds - Red Gems
• Borage
• Zinnias - Giant Dahlia Mix (originally I wanted to grow the State Fair mix, which I think is what my Dad used to grow, but they were all sold out of those seeds when I made my order)
• Sage 
• Bell peppers - Islander (they're PURPLE!)
• Green beans - Jade
• Mint
• Grape tomatoes - Red Pearl (which makes me think of the Black Pearl, which makes me think of pirates, which makes me happy)
• Heirloom tomatoes - Amish Paste
• Anise Hyssop
• Thyme - Orange
• Cosmos - Sensation Mix
• Lemon Basil (from my Dad, which makes it special even without a fancy name)

Alex came out and planted with me for a while, which was wonderful. As we finished the last bed, he turned cameraman to document the event. Here are some of the pictures he took:

Yes, my current watering can is a milk jug with holes punched in the cap.

In less than a half hour, everything was planted, watered, and ready to go. The rest of the evening, I kept peeking out the window to look at the garden, almost like I was expecting to see things sprouting already. This morning I think I've checked on it three times. Of course it looks exactly the same as it did yesterday. But every time I think, maybe something has changed, maybe one of them is growing. And they are, I guess, just not visibly yet. But right now, I bet, they're starting to wake up.

Ready, set...

...Go?

I think today might be the day. Planting time. I still need to finish filling the beds, but I have a good feeling that seeds might go in the ground today. Here's what's been going on the past few days:

On Sunday, Alex and I borrowed a shovel, rake, mattock, and wheelbarrow from our neighbor and started digging. We leveled out the beds and sunk them a few inches into the ground, loosening up the soil and pulling out the weeds in the process. The soil here is very sandy and soft, so all of this was surprisingly easy, which was nice. Also, we discovered that there used to be a tree in the middle of the yard, and it's roots are still buried and not fully decomposed. By the time we were done we had a nice little pile of them that we'd pulled out.

This was the result:

It was so satisfying to turn the earth and get my hands in the dirt. It feels so grounding and nurturing, not to mention exciting when I imagined the plants that will grow there. It's really starting to look like a garden now in a way that it hasn't before. There's something solid and sturdy about it that was missing when the beds were just sitting there on the grass (or on the oak leaves and clover; we don't have much actual grass here).

Then two exciting things happened yesterday: first, the last of my seeds were delivered. I'd been waiting on my backordered arugula seeds from Johnny's, and my Dad said he was sending me basil and cilantro seeds (and a croquet set, just for the fun of it. Thanks Papa!). Both those packages came yesterday.

And the second exciting thing is that I got my topsoil! In the late afternoon I got a call from the dirt guy, saying if I was available in an hour, he could meet me at his landscaping place and I could get my stuff. An hour later, I pulled into the gravel lot and backed my truck up to the pile of lovely, dark brown, slightly sandy topsoil. Steve the dirt guy hopped out of his skid loader, took a look at the topper covering the bed of my truck and asked, "How were you planning on getting this stuff in there?" I smiled cheerfully and said, "Well, I brought I shovel..."

Usually Steve just uses the skid loader to dump the desired amount of material into a person's truck, but my topper prevented him from do that. So instead, he scoped up a load of dirt and drove it over to my truck, so I could just shovel it straight from there and not have to bend over so much. This made it much easier than it would have been if I'd been shoveling straight from the pile.

We chatted while I worked. I told him about Wisconsin, and he told me about how his family has lived in this area for generations. His grandfather ran a hardware store in town that was one of the first in the area to accept credit, back before there was such thing as a credit card. He said his grandfather would just write down the person's name and how much they owed in a notebook that got locked up in the safe every night, and they paid him back when they could.

At one point, Steve's cell phone rang. He answered it, and presumably the person on the other end asked him what he was doing at the moment, because he replied "Well, right now I'm sitting here watching a young lady shovel dirt into her truck." That made me laugh. He sounded a little guilty that he wasn't helping, but he'd already apologized that he didn't have a second shovel. I told him it was fine, this was my workout for the day. (I didn't mention that I'd already done a couple hours of aerial training that morning.)

Neither of us knew what 17 cubic feet of dirt really looked like, so I just guessed. When I asked Steve how much he would change for the pile I'd shoveled, he just smiled and said, "I bet you'll be back, so why don't you just pay for it then." Sometimes, people are wonderful. I told him I'd bring the money by if what I already had did turn out to be enough, then hopped into my significantly more weighted-down truck and drove the three blocks home.

So that's where things stand now. All that's left to do before planting is to shovel the topsoil out of my truck and into the beds, mixing in the compost as I go. This morning I dressed like my Dad does for farming: shorts, a baggy white long-sleeved shirt to keep the sun off, and a kerchief on my head to keep my hair out of my face. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and it's a beautiful day to be working outside. Life is good!