A Berry Good Start

For months now, I have wanted to chronicle our work building the kitchen garden for our new home, as well as our ups and downs navigating the extensive but long neglected landscaping we inherited, but we've been so busy doing, there never seemed time for writing. And the longer I waited, the harder it seemed to start. Rogers and Hammerstein told us that the beginning was a very good place to start. But the further out we've come from the beginning, the more overwhelmed I've been at the prospect of starting there.

Tristar on left, Jewel on right, both from Raintree

Then, yesterday, as I put in our strawberries, I decided that I should just start here. I couldn't remember what variety of strawberries I had planted from when I started to when I finished. My boys were also very excited about the seedlings coming up in the block border of our rhubarb bed--and I really don't know what I planted there. I think it is Night Phlox, but it might be Chinese Forget-Me-Nots. Either way, it is clear that my head is not a safe place for keeping this sort of information.

So here we are. It has been a whirlwind, and we have dived in head-first, learning a lot as we go. I am comforted that the art and science of gardening is learned mostly through the doing and experimenting, and if we do something wrong this year, we'll hopefully do it better next.

There is so much to record, so many pictures to take, so many stories to tell regarding this family adventure. We haven't done everything according to plan, but we did plant the strawberries before they died in the box, and that is a berry good thing.