Gardening Hero

Alrighty then - a week has gone by with nothing much to report. The first half of the week the weather was cold and I had the yucks, which lead to curling up in bed with a few good books and far too much bad T.V. I couldn't even get up the motivation to knit more than a few rows. The second half of the week I felt fine, but stayed very busy with work stuff.

So, lets jump back to last Saturday and the great adventure I would have reported this week, shall we? Saturday morning, Gwen and I made a quick trip over to Mom's to pick up plants she'd found for me. (I now have a baby Flowering Maple, very exciting.) While I was there without a husband in tow, Mom took me to see a woman who has turned her (slightly larger than average) yard in to a farm.

It was great. I bought fresh chard. So fresh, that I watched her cut it out of the row, being careful not to step on her still-fruiting strawberries. And salad greens with flowers and herbs in them, sprouts that crunch delightfully and just barely resisted buying more tea. (I wouldn't have resisted at all if I had any more space left on my tea shelf.) She was a wealth of information, though I suspect she's also the kind of person for whom things just grow. She knew every inch of her garden and went on at length about the vagaries of each plant and pest. When Mom brought up our brazilian fruit bushes, she immediately began reminiscing about climbing the 15' high one outside her grandmother's door in Brazil and then told us she had one down in the orchard (of sorts) that she was starting from seed. She also warned us it will need more water than we had been told. I'll be betting on her this summer and keeping the soil moist.

But, the best part was spending a good hour enjoying her garden. She doesn't worry about weeds, just pulling them out of the rows of vegetables and allowing them to grow anywhere else. (Though, even that can be farming - when we arrived she was busy pulling weeds the root of which would be added to the salad she was taking to a birthday party.) And she's not particularly worried about traditional aesthetics, either, using "junk" as trellises or supports. She does, however, add any piece of whimsy that catches her eye, like this old parking meter beside the driveway.

I want to be her when I grow up.