Gardening

It's been a lovely weekend spent in the garden. There's something spiritual about digging, planting and sowing seeds. It connects us (gardeners) to the earth and certainly reminds me to be grateful for farmers. The idea that I could grow all my own vegetables (much less our sustenance) is daunting. I'm keen on our three-to-four seasons in our benign climate, but the effort it would take to can, freeze, and store our growing season bounty sounds like hard work, and it is.

I love to garden. The physical effort, checking the plants, enjoying fruit production, watching the pollinators -- all of these things I love. I do enjoy my vegetable garden the most (I think because I love to cook directly from the garden), but our restored landscape provides peace.


Our front yard didn't always look like this -- it was a vast lawn desert when we moved in.

The backyard, ditto. And we're still working on both.

The view from the porch keeps improving -- I've got to add more bird feeders, to be sure. But here's another view from the front steps.

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A front entrance to the garden

Our front yard didn't always look this way. When we moved in, it was a long dull expanse of lawn, punctuated by a row of magnolias and dogwoods, in alternation with a single white pine. Beyond that was a dying red tip hedge, planted by the second owner (we're the third owners).

We've lived here almost fifteen years now, but it didn't take long for the young trees that my gardening companion planted to make a difference.

Now, it's like a natural woodland, with a variety of native hardwoods developing the canopy, with an understory of small native trees and shrubs. All that we did was try to recreate (and speed up) what nature might do in a open field, if there were ample seed sources nearby.

We had to provide our own saplings; but the regenerative power of planting is as simple as digging a hole, amending the soil a bit, and keeping a young tree or shrub watered through its first seasons (and maybe a bit during exceptional droughty times like now.)

An nice comment from a fellow blogger on another post got me thinking about this again -- we're not 'experienced gardeners'-- we do know about plants, but that doesn't mean we knew how to grow things very well when we bought a old house that we fell in love with. My parents certainly weren't gardeners.

And since we transformed our lawn expanses into a wildlife-friendly garden, simply by planting a diversity of native (mostly) shrubs and trees (and we're still working on it) -- I'd like to think encouragingly that all it takes is a shovel and a plant. And repeating that. And then doing it again. And replacing plants that don't do well. And there's great joy in the results.

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