A Season of Growing (and Getting It Wrong)

We're figuring out this whole growing-our-own-food thing as we go...

There's a moment in recent mornings, before the house is really awake, where I take Clive outside with me and the sun is just coming up and it's still cool out and the birds are going, and it's so peaceful that I sit there for a little while with the light in my eyes. I'm standing in the middle of eighteen garden beds with my coffee, trying to remember which things need harvesting and which will need to be rotated out soon, thinking about the seeds I want to start, admiring the wildflowers….it's my favorite way to start the day. Back in California our mornings looked nothing like this. We'd make eggs or run out for breakfast burritos from Erewhon, and we spent almost no time in our own backyard. It's funny, when I think of California living it seems like I should have been outside all the time, but we were always on the go, in the car, off to places, in the air conditioning on hot days.

I think about our house we sold in Pasadena sometimes, and the flowers growing in the backyard were so beautiful, but the lot was mainly on a hill and shaded by these gorgeous old oak trees, not much sun all day in the flat areas I would have needed for garden beds, and looking at it now I know my garden never could have thrived there the way it does here. And we certainly couldn't have had chickens for our own eggs. It's strange to realize how much of our life has changed in a year and a half…