Let It Grow, Let It Grow, Let It Grow!

Gardening time is upon us and I don’t know about you, but I am getting super excited to get into my garden and start planting and tending. Just yesterday my two-year-old daughter and I spent time basking in the sun, holding worms and pulling weeds. There in nothing like seeing my baby with her shoes off, toes in the dirt happily investigating the world around her. 

This is one of my favorite times of the year when we were planning the garden. What are we going to plant this year? When is it safe for us to start putting out plants with our on again off again weather? What do we wanna do differently this year from last year? More flowers? More veggies?

Last year was our first season in the community garden, which is literally right beside our apartment. Up to that point, I will admit that I never really felt like I was home in our apartment and we have been in it for a few years now. As soon as my daughter and I started working in our garden plot, pardon my cheesiness, but something more than plants began to grow. A new sense of home began to develop for me. Coming home from work and going into the garden to see what is new, what has changed, and what can be brought upstairs for dinner. Bringing home new plants, having the baby digging in the dirt and picking out seeds from the packets, and the two of us playing in the sun introduced a new sense of ease to our house despite adding “more work.”

I am not sure exactly what it is about having our own little plot of dirt that has cultivated a sense of home but it has. Is it lizard brain telling me now you have land cultivate it, feed your offspring, grow and prosper? Is it the sense of community that gardening brings, growing food and community? Or is it just the closeness that food brings to a family. Then add to that the satisfaction of growing, producing and cooking your hard work? I don’t exactly have the answer, and perhaps it is all of those things.What I do know is that the addition of a garden into my family has been a blessing. If I can’t have a house with a yard and wide open spaces at least I can have a plot of ground to call my own.