Gardening at night

In the house I grew up in there was fear, chaos, confusion, and loneliness. It was not a nurturing place.

I have a recurring dream where I am trying to create a garden the yard of the house I grew up in.

I am very excited and hopeful. The soil is hard and the sun is hot. In these dreams, I never get far enough to plant anything, let alone see it grow and harvest it. But I never give up either. Planting the garden seems like the answer. If I can get a garden going, I can transform and heal the past.

The garden is life. Sometimes we're the gardeners, other times we're the plants. Often we're the earwigs and slugs. We seem to devour everything in our paths, just trying to survive. Or maybe we're just trying to find something delicious to eat.

In the garden today

I took the day off (it's Monday) because I couldn't stand the stress of having only two days over the weekend to do all that needs to be done. I am blessed with a long growing season, but I'm really pushing it. No tomatoes in the ground yet; still have peppers to go in. Lots of blackberry brambles to cut up and send off in the green waste can. But I was going to talk about what I did, not what I didn't do.

Built a trellis and put in snap peas that sat sadly in their six pack for too long. Prepared two more beds. Killed lots of earwigs and snails - the bottoms of my garden clogs are sticky with carnage. Planted more baby bok choy. Started lettuce, onions, cilantro, and lemon cucumber. All old seeds, so I planted a lot.

Happy plants already in the ground include sweet peas and peppers (Habanero, Fatali, Fresno, Marconi Red, Tolli's Sweet, Chervenka Chuska, Jalapeno, Buran). That's only eight varieties, wish I had more dirt. Also the corn is as high as a field mouse's eye. Three kinds of lettuce are happy - Galactic (a red), Butter Crunch, and some green stuff that I forget the name of. Snap peas, snow peas, and shelling peas. Harvested my first snow peas yesterday. Wonder if any will make it past my mouth and into the house this year.

When I'm getting the garden ready for planting, it's too big. When I'm planting, all of the sudden it's too small.