The garden is coming along! I wish I could say we had plants in already, but thanks to a family of bunnies that lives somewhere in our backyard, I could not bring myself to take the chance of planting before the fence is up. We would like to feed the people, please!

But posts are in (Andrew cemented them in right before we received a deluge of rain for days and days last week). I completed the stone path (including putting a floor in the boys’ teepee for fun) yesterday and also tilled quite a bit more compost and chicken manure into the entire area merely minutes before it started to drizzle.

The soil is rich and ready for plants. The boys are itching to plant their beans for the teepee. Oliver has already planted several “helicopter plant” seeds around the base of the fort and even taken good care to cover and water them. Milo found a large (moving, wriggling!) chrysalis of some sort and we will be checking out an extensive insect guide from the library today to track down exactly what it is, as it doesn’t appear in our North America Wildlife Guide! What could it be? Emil enjoys digging in the mud with me and bringing me large clumps of it, extending his clod-filled hand and saying “Muuuuuh!”  It is a joy to be outdoors with them. And it’s going to be a delicious summer!

Oh, look who decided to show up?

We are well into April and I am grateful to report that spring has finally come. It feels like we are playing catch-up in a major way, as we look back at our vegetable garden this time of year last year and can’t help but feel a pang of sadness that not only all of our planting was done, but our veggies had already done a whole lot of growing! We have nothing planted yet, and won’t for at least another week, as we are still in need of topsoil, more compost, and maybe even manure this year. Oh. And a fence. Yes, a fence would be good.

After 10 days (with 3 days off thanks to my Kansas City trip) of hard work in the veggie garden: pulling, digging, hauling and dumping; and the flower gardens: weeding, raking, lifting, mulching, mulching, mulching!!! my arms and lower back ache. Even my abs, which haven’t seen action in a full year, are remembering their purpose. And something has happened to me. The missing piece in the balance that equals happiness falls back into place. I eat right, try to get a decent night’s sleep, keep my home tidy and kitchen tidier, see friends and have a pretty good social life. But all of those pieces float around above my foggy mind until… I remember. I kick my ass with hard physical labor, sometimes in the sunshine, sometimes in the near dark and pouring rain, and suddenly, I can exhale. Oh. This is what I’ve been needing. 

And all that is just the bonus before we get to enjoy it: we are expanding our garden to double the size it was last year and putting in a proper fence. We are garden people. We love the work it takes, the patience, the beauty, what it teaches our children about food and the earth and their ability to nurture things into ripeness, then reap the bounty of their hard work. Gardening is kind of a metaphor for life to us.

But right now is the hard part. Right now we have to add and add and add before we can take anything away. We have to deal with ugly and slow and messy before we can even chart out what we want to grow. We do this work with thoughts of years to come and mouths to feed and the joy that the garden will bring us. But you know what? That slow, messy process is healing me. And so…

Patience.