The house that I moved from into our current home was a fixer-upper in Fountain Square that had yet to be fixed up when I lived there. When I was planning my move-in, I was looking at all kinds of plans for painting the walls because I had never painted walls before. I wanted color. I wanted awesome.
Shortly after taking a closer look at the house, I realized that all my hopes were dashed. The walls were anything but square and each and every room had a unique texture applied to the walls and sometimes ceilings. I say unique in the most literal of ways. The walls in one room were differently textured from the next. So, I chose paints but knew that I wouldn't be able to enjoy the crisp lines of meeting colors that I had favored in my magazine perusing.
Fast forward about 5 years to the new house and the garden. I look at magazine pictures all the time of these amazing gardens. I see the gardens at
Hobbit Garden. I dream of the same kind of planned space that I wanted when I was preparing to paint those walls. Then I have morning after morning of randomly planting seeds and seedlings. There are things growing everywhere and only some of them show a semblance of order or rows.
Today, for example, I decided to plant this sickly looking pepper seedling that should have been in the ground in May. It was a leftover, really, but I have some space that isn't being used so I was just going to put it there. Then I tried to dig in that space, which is in the garden left by the last residents, and it was so hard my trowel wouldn't break it. That left only one option. Dig an oddly shaped, 2-feet deep canyon in the middle of the garden. Dump the compost, that has gone anaerobic, from the large container in the garage into the bottom of it. Cover it back up. Tada. Fixed.
I had absolutely no idea just how nasty the goop in that container had become. It was not a very good idea, perhaps. The smell wasn't in full effect until the dumping was done and all the ick from the bottom was now the top. I added a little lime because I think that makes stuff decompose faster. I added some peat because I felt it needed some brown in its overly green mix. Then I buried it as quickly as possible.
In a year, or less, that will be the most fertile part of the garden. It will also still be a very oddly shaped patch right in the middle. It currently has a pepper and a tomato plant freshly planted right over it. The volunteer cucumber plant is right next to it.
Perhaps next year my garden will have some straight lines. Perhaps
Dreamy will come through with his purported 'plannerness' and help me actually draw things out before we get too deeply entrenched. For this year, though, the madness is much like those old walls. It isn't what I imagined but it is home. I am very excited to have fresh produce to share with neighbors and friends. I am very excited to plant my next round of seeds for this year, whatever those turn out to be.
Life is seldom about straight lines. I'm getting better at being okay with that. Visiting my curvy garden every morning is one of my deepest joys. What can I say? I love it!
