My love affair with gardening has waxed and waned throughout my life. Before I started Kindergarten my parents and I moved to my paternal great-grandmother’s 40 acres in rural Southern Indiana. The summer we spent there (before winter hit and my mom realized her Texan blood wasn’t made for Indiana winters and we all retreated back to the Lone Star state) was my first glimpse at a lifestyle I would grow to love 25 years later. While living with “Granny W.” I helped her sow vegetable seeds in her garden, enjoyed jars and jars of her preserved food, and ate cornbread from a cast iron skillet. My dad and I started building a cabin from logs he cut himself and enjoyed hunting and fishing. Some of the less idyllic parts of that summer included using an outhouse full of daddy long-legs as our main toilet, hauling water from the well to boil for our baths and drinking water since the house had no running water yet, and bathing in the stock pond, but I was a kid and enjoyed every moment.
When we moved back to the suburbs of Central Texas and I started elementary school I stayed with my Nana after school and during the summer. Nana is Granny W.’s daughter and grew up on the land we had lived on in similar, if not harsher, conditions. Nana and I spent hours tilling, planting, and tending her huge garden in her suburban neighborhood. Instead of a lemonade stand I would set up a mini vegetable stand to sell fresh veggies to passersby. I also helped her cut and sort fabric for quilt tops and other sewing projects. We would take summer trips to visit Granny W. to get a taste of the country life from time to time.
As time passed and the teenage years came and went, I traded gardening with Nana for school work, boys, and friends. She and my grandfather moved back to Indiana once Granny W. passed away to live on the land she left behind. I lost the connection I once had to the natural cycle of the Earth and replaced it with spending time with my boyfriend (who later became my husband and partner in this daily chaos), clothes, and going out (as most people in their late-teens and early twenties do).
Even after Matt and I bought our first home in 2004, a newly constructed starter in a bedroom community, I didn’t feel the itch to get my fingers in the dirt again.
Until 2012…
Matt and I had already made a switch to more environmentally friendly options like reusable cloth grocery bags (our small town grocery store thought we were crazy), organic/local food, using reusable water bottles, and recycling everything that we could. I can’t even remember how the conversation got started, but we decided to use part of our huge backyard to grow veggies as organically as possible and in the Spring of 2012 we got started.
To be continued…