I'm currently sitting outside in my father-in-law's garden admiring the vegetable harvest. Well, maybe more than just admiring - more like partaking. Every once in a while I get up and steal a tomato straight off the vine. They are warm and delicious. The smell of the tomatoes and vines is making me swoon. Unbridled natural greeny harvesty goodness. I could not be happier!

I don't have my own garden yet, which I'm sad about. We moved to a new (to us) house last year and we are just now doing some things in our backyard - figuring out where the veg gardens will go, in with the flower gardens, gazebo, dining area, firepit, and all the things one needs to help one relax. Our soil is pretty much just clay - it's really hard to even get the spade in the ground. I'll need to bring in a bunch of good soil and put it on top.

I had a great little garden in the house we rented when we first moved to Ottawa. I just jumped in and dug it up without a plan and put in tomatoes, potatoes, corn, squash, cucumbers, peas, and beans. It was really fruitful - we were giving away bunches of veg by the end of the summer.  I loved being out there, no matter what the weather. Super hot and humid days with sweat dripping off me, or colder foggy mornings wandering around picking lettuce for lunch salads. Either way was good for me. It made me feel alive.

I love digging - not sure why, but I always have. My husband wanted to get the garden roto-tilled, and I refused. I dug the whole thing by hand. I'm not sure if either way is better in the end, but it was so completely satisfying to dig the soil, spadeful by spadeful, until it was a perfect bed for the little seeds. It really felt like I had created that garden completely from scratch. I sat out in the garden much of those summers, watching the vegetables grow. And one summer, I sat out under the umbrella writing my Master's thesis on the laptop, surrounded by plants. Heaven!

I'm not sure why I stopped gardening. We had another house for a while and we focused on the flower gardens and deck. I had a small garden for veg but it wasn't half as great as the first one. Then we had a place out in the country and there wasn't any land that was particularly good for a garden where I wouldn't be digging into the septic field.

So now we have a place in the city that is big enough for a garden, and I'm itching to get going. Soil will be ordered and arriving in the next few weeks and I'll be knee deep in dirt and seeds next spring!