Into the earth!

Three cheers for the biggest hero of the mechanics of the garden! I didn’t know I married a gardener, but it works out great!

Below, another hero with a fancy little machine or two, Jim Weldy, the food pantry’s tiller and black plastic and drip line man.

Three cheers for the adults who helped! We may have floundered without enough independent workers.

Three cheers for the cutest member of the team!

Three cheers for Carmen and Reuben who worked us into their schedule just a few weeks before their wedding.

Three cheers for nephew Darl Lee! Darl brought supplies and even planted the sunflowers he brought from Doris (his mom).

I have two favorite moments from the garden so far.

On the first night, I hand-wrote a cardboard sign and included a line of Spanish. We then called over our neighbor Benjamin to check my Spanish. He said it was okay, but then he said, “Do you have a marker?” He took it, and added in Spanish, protect this earth (garden?), this is for you.

My second favorite moment happened about half an hour after our big planting night. We were outside cleaning up when one of the boys who had helped came back with a question.

“Are they growing yet?”

We as adults can chuckle, but that’s a little like watching for growth in our own lives sometimes, isn’t it?

Right now, with the hot weather, we are just trying to keep them from dying of transplant shock. And hopefully, they are growing too, even though we don’t see it.

Remember the vegetables we planted beside the apartment buildings? We drive past frequently, and if the light turns red, we have time to look. The other night I rolled down my window and hollered to the people on the stoop.

“How are the plants?”

“Good,” they hollered back, and the little boy I had angered came bounding down to the street.

“Are you watering them?” I shouted, and the young girl who wanted to plant in the corner said she was.

But I didn’t just take their word for it. I peered at the pots and the dusty corner garden.

What tomato plants! I caught a glimpse of slender green stalks and crowns of ruffly leaves, much more than doubled in size since the planting a few weeks before.

Won’t this be a lark, if the best tomato plant out of our 75 plants is that one in the dusty corner!