Getting Started

A friend sat at my kitchen table with a printed list of thirty things she thought she had to learn first. I told her what my own list did to me, and what happened when the year finally had only one thing in it.

After two weeks away for a family emergency I came home to a yard that had gone feral in the heat, and I sat on the back step and seriously considered mowing all of it flat. Here is what happened instead.

My husband did not want the yard turned into a project, and he said so in the driveway on a Sunday in May. We are five years past that argument now and I still think he was partly right.

I finally took a tape measure to our lot one evening and found roughly a quarter of the growing space I had been picturing. It has since fed us more than I expected, mostly because I stopped laying things out in rows.

A year in, I dragged the seed shelf out of the basement and admitted I was not going to use it again. These are the projects I dropped, why I dropped them, and which ones I still feel a little sheepish about.

The first bed I dug was cut out of the lawn beside our driveway with my mother’s old serrated knife, because I did not own a spade yet. Here is what that first season actually looked like, including the parts that failed.