Big and Small (July 21, 2012)

The garden I joined is really coming along. It’s amazing how quickly it was turned from a patch of grass and ivy into a growing garden with raised beds, irrigation, and plants and vegetables of all types. Ground was broken only 2 months ago. We shoveled dirt and drilled boards to make beds over the course of five or six Saturdays. Some people did a lot more work, staying extra hours to coax the irrigation system to life. We planted a few weeks ago and already some people are harvesting vegetables. I picked my first one today, a single yellow pear-shaped tomato.

Only an inch long but it had good flavor. Is it worth blogging about? Sure! My garden is growing and there’s edible stuff in there. Nature really is amazing.

As for the big things in the garden, as of today there is a composter that is almost the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Seriously. It’s an 80-gallon tumbling wonder. The photo below shows how giant it is (with a gallon of paint next to it for size comparison).

I’m painting a wall that frames one side of the garden. Right now it has beige primer on it (the wall has only slightly more primer than my hands do! I started out with plastic gloves but I ditched them when they got hot and uncomfortable.) Stand by for photos of the mural when there’s something on it besides primer.

This garden is really special to me. It came out of nowhere, just when I was ready for a project and a connection to neighbors with similar interests to mine. It’s such a friendly group of people, do-it-yourselfers like me, who don’t mind shoveling dirt on their Saturdays, who lend tools and share plants. One lady helped prime the wall yesterday. She loves to be involved and she helped make the raised beds, too. She’s in her late 60s, and while she’s small in size (less than five feet tall), she’s big and mighty in her enthusiasm. She embodies what this garden is about. When faced with turning a wedge of rocky land into a garden, some might say, “Why bother?” But like my gardening-and-painting friend, this group said, “Why not?” And they made it happen. It’s about community. We’ve learned new skills and made new friends. Our plants are growing, and so are we.