Preparing the earth for our future food

There is nothing more basic, more real than planting a garden. You start with a seed. A seed in which you sink into a small cup of soil, water and place in a sunny spot. You care for it and watch its green bud appear. Now, after growing in the protection of your house, you must prepare your piece of earth outside for this beautiful living thing that will soon produce vegetables for harvesting. It is a timeline of progress that is worth noting whether you have ever tended a garden or not. Especially for this blog because our vegetable and herb gardens will be a part of our future meals.

Today was a brisk and windy day. The sun was shining so there was work to be done. My husband and I made sure that we raked compost through our raised beds where our vegetables will be soon planted. I spread mulch throughout the area surrounding the gardens and my husband prepared the fence posts. It was really great to see progress coming along in preparing to move our garden to the great outdoors. The plants in their starter squares are rapidly outgrowing them. Now to just get more steady temperatures!

It will be interesting also to feel the pride and satisfaction of serving a meal that includes items from our own garden. There will be a lot of inspiration and less waste.

I'm already a stickler about wasting food. I simply won't allow it. The last two recipes that we made were perfect examples. My husband cooked up a huge pot of split pea soup with the ham we had left from Easter. I whipped together a chicken salad using our rotisserie chicken from last night's dinner. I used red grapes that I had in the fridge, celery, honey and mayo with a generous amount of course ground salt and toasted potato bread. It was perfect with the split pea soup plus it thrilled me to know that we used up everything we could from other meals to make a delicious one tonight.

The rule for our vegetables will have to follow the same standard: Use as much as we can incorporate into our cooking and share what we cannot possibly eat by ourselves.