With silver bells and cockle shells

Our family is reading France Hodgson Burnett's 'The Secret Garden' right now and while I did not purposefully plan to read this in spring, it has made this season so much richer. For me, the book is a reread as I read and reread this book throughout my childhood. I love the magic of this story that is simply watching things grow.

We are working on a garden of our own and while it is not secret (it's a community garden, in fact), we sort of feel like Mary discovering plants buried in the weeds and grass, remnants of the plot's former gardener. We pulled back all sorts of weeds to find, as Mary called them, "green points" poking their way through. We have guesses to what we'll find when it's time for harvest, but we'll just have to wait and see.

I've had to redirect my vision of a vegetable garden for this. In the past, we did small, contained Square Foot Gardens in our own yard. I'm completely overwhelmed by the amount of space we have in this garden (and consequently the amount of weeding we will be facing), and a little sad about not being able to walk into my own yard for a fresh tomato. But, as we are renting from a landlord who really loves his green grass and also live in an area heavily populated with deer, it makes more sense to drop our vegetables in this bit of land.

We planted a TON of tomatoes, a lot of squash and pumpkins, and otherwise a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It's occurred to me that if this garden is something we choose to do year after year, we can certainly build our square foot gardens right on this space. But we'll see what this year holds and go from there. I don't have lofty goals. The main concern to me is that our tomatoes are successful, which will allow us to can a lot of spaghetti sauce and some salsa. Though I'm not ready to think about canning yet. I'm ready to enjoy this wonderful, hopefully slow-moving bit of summer we have coming our way.