garden dreams

As a child, I did everything I could to get out of having much to do with our small vegetable patch at home. I did not want to hoe, dig, weed, or maintain.  I think I may have helped with watering, when coerced.  And probably helped with harvesting, since the reward at that stage was great.  In fact, I can almost hear my mom laughing as she reads this post about my dream for a garden.  I have never been one to have a particularly green thumb.  But more and more I find myself wishing that I did.  And now I'm planning, and dreaming for the future.  There is a lovely area in the back yard, where a shed currently sits, that will hopefully in the next 6 months become a empty spot of earth ready to create a garden in.  So I have been dreaming and pondering as I page through Garden Anywhere, by Alys Fowler, and Grow Great Grub, by Gayla Trail.  Sadly, these books are both mine only temporarily, from inter-library loan.  Maybe they can go on my Christmas wish list... 

I'm dreaming of raised beds, and lots of tomatoes for the kids to eat raw and for sauce making, of zucchini, and carrots, beans, and lots of herbs.  I'm dreaming of blueberry bushes.  Lots of lettuces.  I realize I'm going a little crazy when I start to picture dwarf apple trees along the fence line.  I'm also dreaming of eating our own produce, of making preserves and of a freezer full of garden goodness waiting to be eaten through the winter.   This year's applesauce making, I hope, is only the start.

We'll have to see what materializes. How fast that shed really disappears. And whether my thumb of black starts to show any signs of green.  I will need good friends who don't mind helping me along...my friend Patty had a fabulous garden this year.  I will need good books, and some good luck, and good weather.  

I love these cooler autumn days.  I love the beauty of fall, and pumpkins and leaves on the sidewalks, and seeing the winter birds in the back yard for the first time this season just this morning-- juncos, chickadees, cardinals, and even a squawking blue jay.  But today, I am dreaming of next summer, and of green.