I Garden, Therefore I Am

Or is it, "I am, therefore I garden" ? Okay, that was corny.

Here's what I've been working on this week...

Surpise! It's garden themed. I am honing in on what makes me happy these days...dirt. And of course, what grows in it. It really is a satisfying kind of thing, growing your own food, shade and beauty. I do feel the illustration could use a bug or a bird or something.

It has rained and snowed quite a bit lately, and though I do not normally mind the moisture, this week I am trying to till the garden. Which is a problem due to our thick clay soil that lately, to be frank, squishes. I did at least get the garden cleaned out of rocks, dried up plants and old mulch. And look what grew over the winter...recognize the gloves?

We ate the carrots; they were very sweet. And isn't the thyme a pretty purple? Last year was the first year I grew it, so I was surprised it lived through winter and turned color.

So, here is what the garden looks like all cleaned up...

A mud hole, essentially, but come summer it will be greener and hopefully more abundant in way of vegetables and less in way of pests. Fingers crossed.

Gardening note to self: do not use landscape fabric. Use plastic. Over the winter, the threads loosened and earthworms got stuck in them. Not fun picking tiny threads to un-trap earthworms. On a happy note, most of them survived! It took a considerable amount of time, but earthworms are more useful squirming in the dirt then caught up in fabric mulch.

Sometimes, such as in this scenario, gardening entails doing things that I do not remotely like to do. But I do it anyway.

Successful gardening is doing what has to be done when it has to be done the way it ought to be done whether you want to do it or not.

-Jerry Baker

Right on, Jerry Baker. Right on.