Welcome to the summer of the blog. If I can keep this up all summer, my reward it getting to go Pro in the fall.

This summer’s themes are Gardening, Living, Mothering. I added Teaching to the categories because I might find things I want to incorporate in that section, but I am hoping to stay at least a little clear of the teaching world…at least in July.

So to begin.

In February, my husband, 3-yr-old daughter, and I moved to a new house close to the campus where we teach. I had been jonesing for living in a house again after living in a tri-plex for nearly three years. I wanted a yard with space to garden. And this house has just that. So this summer is my first foray into gardening since, well…the last time we moved into a new house with space for a garden (2000).

I wasn’t going to jump head-long into veggie gardening again, but in mid-April a friend had a tiller that he volunteered to use on composty-patch in the back corner of our lot. I said “Ok…might as well do that and I will put in some plants that I won’t care about.” After all, I had no intention of actually “gardening” in the formal sense. but I could put in some plants and see what happened.

So Jason tilled a patch.

Not a bad start. We soon found out that the blue spigot to the right of the frame was hooked directly to our hot-water heater, so that was out as a source of water for the garden. But it did clean Jason’s tiller nicely.

After procuring romaine and butter crunch lettuce, spinach, radish and asparagus seeds, chard, and tomatoes, we planted.

I am not a stellar gardener. I have tortured and killed many a plant, potted and otherwise. One friend of the family said that my indoor plants seemed to live just to spite me.

So far, the garden has flourished, or at least survived. Mid-May, Daria and I began harvesting spinach, lettuce, radishes and chard.

Mid-June, I left town for 9 days. Jacob and Daria picked spinach and lettuce but didn’t weed.

I came back to…

Daria and I wrestled with weeds and replaced the radish patch with some new tomatoes given to us by friends.

In addition to the fact that I still have a garden where things are still growing after two months is the fact that I moved into a house that has all of this…

And finally…two plants I have always, always wanted but never had…

So why blog now? Well, I want to start writing again, and journals worked well when I was trapped at home with Daria on maternity leave. I could journal while holding her and rocking. But now, I don’t journal, and I don’t want to lose this summer like so many others to the lazy hazy days that bleed one into another. I want her to have something that captures the rare moments and miracles that are everyday in our existence. We live in a beautiful place, here in the valley of the Blue Mountains. This summer, I want to work on making that beautiful place really our home.