I Will Buy You A Garden

“I made you something,” Andy said when I got back to the Shack on Sunday. Cranky from my five-hour drive back from the Twin Cities and feeling (somewhat melodramatically) as though I’d arrived up at the very end of the world, I raised my eyebrow.

“Yeah? What?” I asked.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe, a necklace made out of bubble gum wrappers?

It turned out to be a lot better than a bubble gum wrapper necklace.

While I gallivanted in New York City, Andy constructed a raised garden bed at the cabin where we’ll be spending the summer. My mother gave me some flower seeds for my birthday in March and at the time, I didn’t know quite what to do with the seeds. While I’ve been dreaming of a garden all winter, the Shack is located in a shady valley that doesn’t appear particularly agriculturally viable. But my new summer job has lead to shift in residencies for the summer where the raised bed Andy built as well as the pre-existing terraced beds with warrant plenty of digging in the dirt this summer.

Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

Now that the means exist to have a bit of a garden, we’re faced with the dilemma of deciding what to plant. Although it’ll still be awhile before any seedlings can be put out in the garden, we’re a little behind on starting seedlings. I really don’t want to bite off more than we can chew when it comes to garden maintenance, so I want to be as smart about this project as possible. One of my concerns is that the garden is as sustainable as possible.

Gardening seems the ultimate sustainable act, but gardening can generate a ton of largely unusable plastic waste. Just think of all the dinky little plastic 4/6-pack containers you accumulate on a trip to the greenhouse. Molly over at the Snyder 5 has a great idea on how to use egg cartons to start seedlings: Composting for Newbies. That’s so smart! I need to pick up some potting soil from my parents’ house tomorrow and then I plan to start a batch of flowers in an egg carton tomorrow evening.

We plopped a few tulip bulbs – excess favors from coworkers’ wedding last September – in the perennial garden last fall. Like most things you “plop” in the ground, I promptly forgot about them. So it’s fun to see all three tulips poking up now.

I have a cold, probably just travel fatigue catching up with me. We’re also in the process of moving out of the Shack for the summer. Our bedroom currently looks like a suitcase vomited in it and my desk space is a teetering cityscape of notebook towers and paperclip ponds. I should spend the evening organizing, but I’m more keen to plant my sweet pea seeds in the far corner of the raised bed.

I’ve gotten back to work. I have some calls out for an article that needs to be done by the end of the week and as long as I actually get some calls back, I think it has potential to be a really good article. I’m also in the process of setting up some interviews for my radio project and my current priority needs to be hammering out a draft of a commentary.

Speaking of commentaries, here’s my recent effort.

A college colleague got in touch with me yesterday regarding a freelance opportunity for the website he edits. My interest is piqued, but I need more details before I make a commitment to any more work.