The Garden

I had a unique garden opportunity this weekend. My husband and the Misses were off doing their own thing and I had almost unlimited time to play in the dirt on Saturday. It just so happened that a service organization in our county had their annual service day on Saturday. This meant that there were thousands of willing hands available around the county, and some of them came to the center where the garden is located.

We had people willing to work in the garden for a few hours just because they could! How awesome is that? Of course, they were also busy doing lots of other jobs around the property, but some of them did come hang out with us for a while.

Now, the point of this post isn't so much about the really cool people who gave up their Saturday morning to lay newspaper and leaf mulch around our precious herbs and tomato plants, although that is a truly COOL thing. No, the point of this post is to marvel over the miracle of seeds sprouting.

We noticed the first seedlings on Friday, and danced in the rows. When we arrived in the garden around 8:30 on Saturday morning, we found a few bean more plants poking up their tiny leaves, some cute corn plants, and not much else other than the plants we had planted last weekend.

Fast forward to around noon. I was busily directing folks in the fine art of laying newspaper as a weed barrier, totally ignoring the seed rows when a yell caught my attention.

"Stephanie! We have pink-eyed peas! And okra!"

Euphoria! More of the crops had sprouted. And low-and-behold, the bean rows were truly rows of little plants. You could see an entire row of green shoots. And the corn was tall enough to measure with more than the tip of my pinky finger. We were able to take down the string row markers much earlier than we had hoped.

I was in awe. What had been mounded rows of soil scant hours earlier was looking like a true garden. I felt like a proud Mama who's child had just done something amazing. This garden that I have loved and nurtured, prayed over and cursed for almost a year is growing again.

I am not sure that I am going to be able to stay away until my next scheduled workday on Friday. I may have to go check on my little green babies. I want to see how much they have grown in just a few days. I want to cheer them on.

And I want to dance in the rows like a crazy woman, just like we did when we first saw those first precious little green leaves.