blank slate.

When we moved into our house five years ago, we were renting it from friends.  Two years later, we bought the house.  With the house we inherited beautiful perennial flower gardens that our friend made when her girls, who are now both teenagers, were small.  I didn't know much about flower gardening, and the first couple of years I grew a lot of what I would come to find were mostly beautiful weeds.  Little by little, bed by bed I learned this land and those gardens, and I have a new appreciation for flower gardening.  I enjoy watching the micro seasons of a perennial garden and watching the passing of a summer marked by changing blooms.

For the past three years we have been wanting to put in a large veggie garden.  But small children, traveling, and a new baby kept our summers busy, and we were content with a small patch of land we converted from an old perennial bed to grow our veggies.  For Mother's Day this year, I got a large veggie garden, or at least the land prepared for it.  This is in large part due to my friend Erin and her dad.  Erin lugged her dad's rototiller all the way down from New Hampshire, and for that I owe them both a big thank you!  I spent my Mother's Day shaping beds and the weeks since mulching the paths, planting flowers, seeds, and plants waiting for the weather to warm. 

The garden space before

The blank slate

This is one of my favorite times in the garden.  The blank slate, when anything is possible.  I love to come out here and watch.  Watch for seedlings to burst through the surface, watch for signs that it might actually be time to plant the tomatoes, watch the empty bed that has yet to be planned call out its wish list: brussel sprouts!  Potatoes!  Onions!  Cabbage! 

the new garden

This is a quiet time in the garden where the beauty is in the potential.  There is a quiet, a calm before the storm, before the garden demands work, before the weeds come, before the bugs and slugs and critters come.  There is a quiet time where one can sit and watch and dream of the summer to come.