In The Beginning

Recently I was volunteered to be a Garden Manager for the local Community Garden Association by my employer.  To be honest, I was upset that my employer had agreed to me giving up my personal time away from work without first asking me if I would be willing to do so.  I soon learned that they thought that I would only be helping to plant a plot or two for our agencies consumers and that would be the end of the proposition. Oh, how wrong they were!  

A month into this arrangement, I have accepted the fact that I will be spending several hours a week watering a garden that is larger than my own fairly large back yard.  I can even handle pulling rocks and grass tufts from the burgeoning area during my weekends while my supervisor gets to enjoy his time away from work.  What I don't like, and never will is the fact that I take these things on with an abandon that must surely irritate my husband and children as they often get neglected in the process of all the time that a new project uses.  

Strangely enough, I have found that I am excited to be digging in the soil (as I am told it must be called) and planting enough for the entire year.  Ok, maybe not the entire year but it sure seems that way to me right now.  Our Head Gardener, Bruce, has assured me that I should not be required to devote more than 10-20 minutes to the garden a day but he does not know me very well.  When I accept a new endevour, I throw myself into the project to the point of idiocy.  I am already making big plans that involves an art piece as the center of the garden and possibly a cement bench to sit on when one gets too tired from picking the vegetables.  

I tell you all of this to say that during this process of "volunteering" for the Community Garden, I have re-happened upon a desire that has plagued me in the past.  This desire is to find a simpler way to live.  I want to grow a garden that will be not just readily available for my families dinner table but also produce enough fresh vegetables for me to freeze and preserve by canning.  In all honesty, I have never canned food before and it will be a learning experience for me but I am anxious to try it for the first time.  

As a small child I have memories of sitting in the hot summer sun, peeling blanched tomatoes so that they could be canned while at my step-grandmothers home.  But I digress.  The point is, I want to see where this desire to live a simpler life takes me.  I have seen the changes that have occurred during the last few decades and like others before me, I yearn back to those simpler days of my youth.    I am inviting you, dear reader, to join me in this journey of rediscovery and hopefully restore some of the skills that have been lost or at least neglected while we entered into the realms of modern society.