Coming Full Circle

 I love my garden. I love the dirt. I love how amazing it looks right after it's been tilled. I love how my feet sink in just a little bit when the earth has been freshly turned. I love the rows of little sprouts in the spring and how each row is distinct, how the bean sprouts look completely different from the radish sprouts and the potato sprouts.

Mostly I love the cycle it represents; how it makes me happy, quiets me and satisfies me; how it gives me endless pictures of God.......and how we watched the garden go full circle as a family.

Last fall I marked the corners with white spray paint, trying my hardest to make the corners perfectly square so Adam would be impressed with my precision. The kids and I watched him break ground, seeing the tough sod break and fold under the strength of the turning tines.

Like I do with nearly every decision I make, I questioned myself and cringed a bit at the location I chose; it's so hard to know if this was the right spot. I mean, what if I don't like it here? What if it's too shaded? Too close to the grove? To accessible to deer, rabbits? To far from the house?

But because I've learned that sometimes - maybe most of the time - you just gotta commit and jump in with both feet, I smiled and told Adam it was perfect. And like most other things, if it's a mistake, we'll find out soon enough, we'll learn from it and go from there.

After that, the new garden was soon covered in feet of white snow, and in January I began excitedly paging through seed catalogs and plotting the garden blueprint. Then, at a surprisingly early time in the spring, the snow melted into a swamp that I thought would never go away.

But it did. Before I knew it, it was dry enough for spring tilling, and at a time later than I would have liked, we marked rows with stakes salvaged from the barn and sowed rows upon rows of beautiful little seeds.

Within weeks, precious little sprouts of all shapes and shades of green poked their little heads up through the coarse dirt of the new garden. Nearly every day I would take my tots out there to check for something new springing up. I was shocked by how quickly they learned to identify these plants. Asparagus, in the amazing old patch that we stumbled across when deciding whether or not to buy this property (I can say with almost complete sincerity that the asparagus sealed the deal for me), was the first thing they learned to identify and begin to harvest.

Later came radishes, and my babes could tell those from the onions and the lettuce and the green beans that were slowly filling out the rows of our garden. We enjoyed many salads of tender, frilly leaves while patiently waiting for the Indian Corn to germinate and the squash leaves to fill out the back half of the garden.

One day, just shortly after the fourth of July, I was shocked to find green beans ready for the pickin'. Not just well-they-can-wait-a-few-more-days kind of green beans. These were I-gotta-pick-em-right-now kind of green beans.

In the coming weeks, we picked bucket after bucket after bucket of long gorgeous beans. The kids and I ate them at least twice a day, and the freezer ran night and day trying to freeze all the bags of blanched beans I crammed in there - 55, 2-cup bags in call.

Then came the peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini. We chopped and crunched and baked and steamed and salted and preserved until there were days when I could hardly stand to look at one more item pulled out of that garden.

But you see, it's all so addicting. Even in the heat and the sun with the bugs and the dirt, the garden draws me and calls my name. The kids would romp in the dirt and fill buckets with deeply colored garden bounty while I would weed and inspect. Even during naptime I would still sneak out there in my flip flops and enjoy gathering and tending by myself while the sun beat down on my back and the cornfields surrounding our property grew before my eyes and hedged us in.

When July waned and the heavy hand of August settled upon us with it's golden evenings, it was time to pull the onions and begin picking the bushels of tomatoes. I learned to can and filled the freezer full to the brim.

September came with crisp days, and my little gardeners and I enjoyed the first of the fall produce and finished digging up potatoes.

I was ready to be done with the garden for the year but mustered up enthusiasm and harvest power for the last that the garden had to offer.

(this is only half of the squash we harvested this year)

And finally, when all had been gleaned from the garden, we pulled up the dried vines and dead stalks and filled two large composts piles. (I was amazed when Jack and Ava noticed Daddy digging a second hole and they exclaimed, "Mommy! Another compost! Two composts!" Apparently all the trips out to the "first" compost during the summer with buckets of kitchen scraps actually made sense to them.)

The seeds we had carefully sown had become plants that bore more food than we could eat, and now their dry shriveled remains are buried in dirt and a summer's worth of kitchen scraps slowly becoming the food for future gardens.

It was therapeutic to empty the garden - all four of us working together in the chill of an October day. And once again, Adam began to till the ground, turning the dirt over. Because he's so sweet, he tilled around my brilliantly blooming marigolds bordering the edge of the new and old gardens, even though it would have been much easier to pull them up and till right through.

I stood there, holding my tots' cold hands, and reflected on the past 6 months of gardening. One of the things I like the most about gardening is that there is always next year. Next year there will definitely be less green beans and at least twice the tomatoes. I am going to try much harder to keep the critters from eating my beets; I can't go another summer without garden fresh beets. New additions will likely be peas and carrotts, and the brand new, haven't-grown-since-childhood item will be popcorn.

The smell of fresh dirt ticked my nose just like it had last year upon ground breaking, and my feet sank in just a little bit as we walked across the garden on our way back to the house.