garden | let the harvest begin

let the harvest begin... While many folks were out on the lakes and beaches celebrating the holiday weekend, I was knee deep in compost and loving it. I spent the weekend completely immersed in the garden yanking weeds, planting seeds building beds, moving perennials, and celebrating our first harvests of the season.

Meadow phlox, Oriental poppies, lupine, baptisia and raspberries are in full bloom. Their gorgeous colors make you wonder if we ever had a winter because spring came so very early this year.

I spent an entire day regretting the fact that I ever introduced Black-Eyed Susans to my flower beds. Though I love the flower dearly, its propensity to be such a prolific self-seeder has almost completely choked out all my other perennials and annuals in the beds. Last year I tried to "find new homes" for the ones that I dug out of my beds. This year, I had to take the crueler step of just pulling the plants up and tossing them into the compost. The difference is night and day.

Wild raspberries and wild strawberries carpet the perimeter along the woods. I created a new bed this year just for the wild strawberries to take over. Sure, their fruits are tiny, but oh, so delightful. The only problem is competing with the chipmunk to get to the berries first.

Above are a couple of our vegetable and herb beds. We have several other beds throughout our yard. Each year, my husband takes to the woods with his chain saw to allow a little more sun to glow down onto the gardens. It's a delicate balance gardening in the woods because I adore living amongst the woods, but we do need more sun to have an effective garden. With each year, we slowly create a happier garden climate and my dreams of having a meandering pathway throughout my "secret" gardens becomes one step closer.

Most excitingly, harvest time has officially arrived. Mesclun, spinach, chives and radishes are a plenty. A freshly-snipped salad shares the dinner table each night. The addition of the chive blossoms has been wonderful. They add a crisp oniony-pop to the salad. My goal is to utilize as much of each plant as possible this year.

It totally soothed my soul spending the weekend out in the garden. My dream is to one day parlay this passion into a new career. Really, what could be a better way to spend the day than be outside working in the soil, listening to the bird sing and the bees buzz? Until then, I take my fortune in enjoying what I have and dreaming of my future 10-acre farm.