The Obsession Begins

I'm obsessed , completely and totally obsessed. I dream about it...the dirt, the green plants, the smell of the compost. There is almost nothing I would rather do than have my hands in the soil, planting, digging, feeding, arranging, harvesting.

The obsession began harmlessly enough during my first year of marriage in our home in the Azores. We had a sparse little garden in our concrete yard. The few plants we did have quickly died as I simply didn't know I had to water them. Certainly I had my talents, but apparently gardening wasn't one of them. I remember thinking to myself that the rain was supposed to come and water the plants; I didn't know I had to help that along.

We've lived in an awful lot of climate zones, from frigid Zone 10 in South Dakota to the balmy Zone 3 of Southern Virginia and Alabama. There have been many others in between, including Portugal and Italy where sandy, loamy soil is abundant; in fact the soil in Italy is so sandy it is mostly what I would call full of rocks.

Over many years of brutally killing a lot of innocent plants, I am now presiding over the largest garden yet, about 1100 square feet of garden space, which, for me might as well be the "back 40", it seems so overwhelming.

Over time, I've learned a lot and I've also weaned myself off of conventional garden products and now grow an exclusively organic garden. But it's not easy, especially now that we've just bought this new home with the new garden and I've inherited the past owner's weird gardening choices, none of which are organic. There are plastic weed covers in all the gardens, two and three layers in some places. Plastic doesn't really speak "organics" to me.

This is my first time truly attempting to grow vegetables. My goal is to sustain my family, organically, using seeds from local growers. I refuse to let the corporations control what my family eats and I refuse to watch diverse local species of plants be driven into extinction. So this is me. My politics combined with my crunchiness as foisted upon my family. I'm learning as I go and want to trace that progress through this blog.