2022 Gardening Season Begins

 Greetings from the north!

I do not think I am alone in this, but as I grow older I tend to look back over my life lived to try and find those "formative moments" that somehow steered me, or maybe nudged me, down the path of life I am on.  Sometimes it is not clear to me how I wound up where I am at.  Other times, I can point to a specific event in my past that explains why I do this or that.  Such is the case for my love of gardening.  I can trace it back to my early childhood and a project I did for my mother in kindergarten.  You might say it was putting the garden in garten.

We decorated an empty soup can, placed dirt in the can and we each planted a single pumpkin seed in our planters.  It was a Mother's Day gift.  The teacher, Miss Tuma I think her name was, had us place our planters in the sunny windowsill of our classroom waiting for the day we would proudly take this wonderful treasure home to our mothers.  We all kept watch on our planters and I believe teacher kept them watered.  As Mother's Day approached, my little soup can planter displayed the miracle of a sprouting seed.  It is an event which, all these long years later, still causes such joy in my heart.  

I remember carefully holding my treasured gift for my mother on my walk home.  Thinking about it, I wonder how many of those Mother's Day planters never actually made it home.  In my case, my planter did make it home.  My mother placed the planter in our kitchen window which was the sunniest window in our house and told me we would plant her gift in our backyard once it was warm enough.

I am sure I was impatient and probably asked my mother every day if we could plant the pumpkin yet.  You know how young children are.  But finally the day arrived, and my mother and I placed the now vigorous seedling in the ground.  I kept an eye on the pumpkin vine all summer long.  That plant grew and grew and grew.  I was absolutely amazed at what came out of the flat whitish pumpkin seed.  By the time October rolled around, my mother's pumpkin vine had produced at least half a dozen huge pumpkins - or at least huge to a first grader.  From this point forward, I was forever hooked on gardening.  

This has been the first year I have struggled to plant my seeds.  I have been down in the dumps for months and cannot seem to climb out of the hole I find myself in.  So this year, I planted some pumpkin seeds in honor of the event that started me on my long gardening journey 52 years ago.  It did the trick.  I planted two flats of various garden plants on April 7th, which also happens to be my late brother's birthday.  Now I wait, just like that 6 year-old boy from so long ago.

Cheers!

Tom