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| Burpee's, still a Philadelphia institution. |
Every January, in the post holiday doldrums of early winter, there arrives in the mail those first harbingers of spring, the seed catalogs. Quickening the pulse of gardeners, these are like the earliest of migratory birds returning north and bringing with them the fecund smell of greenery still a season away. This always precipitates conversations about what garden projects we'd like to tackle in the coming months.
My wife and I are avid gardeners and have maintained a large (by urban standards) vegetable garden, roughly forty feet square. Really more of a "truck patch", as my father was fond of saying, we grow heirloom tomatoes, onions, leeks, asparagus, sorrel, collards, chard, peppers, eggplant, several varieties of squash and of course, basil. While a marvel of productivity, the vege patch has not, by any standard, been a thing of beauty. We've been entertaining the notion of redesigning the garden, replacing the badly sagging fence, leveling the interior's current slight slope, and constructing raised beds. I find that the meditation on projects of this kind makes the winter not just speedier, but more fruitful (apologies...).
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| The current "truck patch" |
We'd love to remake this into a more aesthetically pleasing space in keeping with the adjacent more formal rose garden.
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| The rose garden with the truck patch beyond. |
Here's one of our aspirational gardens, of course it's at Martha Stewart's Bedford, NY farm, Cantitoe Corners.
One can always dream...
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| Martha's Cantitoe Corners |
