where it all started

Hey friends...here is where the garden started...with a rototiller given to me by a good friend's family (it's 18 years old) when they moved to Colorado (thanks to the Walls) and the lawnmower is borrowed from the family we are renting from. So starting from these pictures the evolution and creation of the garden begins. You can see the latest pictures from the garden in an earlier post below this one. This has been such a great time to be outside in beauty and putting my hands in the dirt. It has been wonderful, beautiful...and so much more than my words can convey. When you are out there, with the birds singing, your hands in the dirt, pulling weeds, seeing the new life of green plants shooting through the dark dirt after a cool rain, and seeing new life emerge from dust...it is a glorious thing to be a part of.

While I don't have a cherry tree, this poem by Wendell Berry in Given from his Sabbath poems of 2002, poem V, describes the beauty of walking in the garden amidst the life and light of nature, with birds and gardening together, what else could I hope for?:

The cherries turn ripe, ripe,
and the birds come: red-headed
and red-bellied woodpeckers,
blue jays, cedar waxwings,
robins--beautiful, hungry, wild
in our domestic tree. I pick
with the birds, gathering the red
cherries alight among the dark
leaves, my hands so sticky
with juice from the fruit will hardly
drop from them into the pail.
The birds pick as I pick, all
of us delighted in the weighty heights
-the fruit red ripe, the green leaves,
the blue sky and white clouds,
all tending to flight--making
the most of this sweetness against
the time when there will be none.