Each year we have lived in out house we have expanded the garden. Today is a wonderful day and we have been working outside since church: mowing the grass and planting seedlings into egg-cartons. Mowing the grass is like driving to work. You are left to your thoughts, the whir of the blades drowns out everything else and I was thinking about yard work and gardening when I was growing up.
Having a yard in the city is really different. Weed whacking only happened a couple times a year when there was going to be a party, now I feel bad when there is some tall grass around a tree. In the country nobody cared about dandelions. They were a fact of life, and nobody cared about how they looked, or how to get rid of them. Who is crazy enough to try to get rid of 3 acres of them? I just spend 4 hours mowing them along with the “grass.” Now I have a city yard and I spend time digging the “evil” dandelions out. In the country “grass” was any green thing that wasn't in the flower beds and smaller then a tree. If it was in a flower bed then it was classified as a “weed”.
On the subject of weeding, it is one of the things I remember spending most of my summers doing. We had all sorts of good home grown food: corn, carrots, peas, tomatoes, and more. At the time I didn't care. Us kids hated working in the garden. It was a chore that we avoided and when we did something bad we were punished by pulling weeds in the garden. A garden that is roughly the same size as the yard I now own. Maybe that is why they had five kids? Now I stare at that garden as I get ready to plant more vegetables in it. We don't have room for everything we want to plant so we are going to have an annex garden at my parents.
For a long time that garden wasn't used. It went along with other things that we did when I was young that dropped by the wayside. The garden laborers got busier and started to leave the house and there wasn't time for the garden. It's hard to remember that we used to be members of a food co-op and had closets full of canned food. They were replaced with Meijer and then Costco, but in recent years my folks have started to get back into gardening. I can't help but wonder if we will stop doing those things when the kids get older.
For now Eli loves the garden. He plays with the rakes, hoes, and shovels. Whenever we drive in or out of the driveway he screams “I can see the peas!” I am sure that will change when he becomes a teenager, but who knows.