When my husband and I bought this house, we knew that we wanted a garden. At first, I was all about making it pretty. I focused on shrubs, perennials, especially Michigan natives, and some annuals here and there to fill in while the perennials grew in. We did put in a raised bed for a vegetable garden right away. My husband built the frame, and I remember one of my first times going stir-crazy as a new mother, Emily's first spring, when I just had to get outside and decided to remove the grass from the eight by four area the raised bed would soon inhabit. Baby Emily sat bundled against the cool spring air in her stroller, and napped while Mom dug and scraped away at soil that was still partially frozen. It was the first of many times that I've gardened with a baby dozing in a stroller nearby.

I kind of became “in charge” of the garden from the beginning, mostly because I was the most obsessed with it. My husband liked gardening, liked being outside, but he was, at the time, focused on his technology job, going to school, and, eventually, working a second job so that I could stay home with the kids and maybe, just maybe, chase this crazy dream I had of becoming a writer.

Life has gotten infinitely easier since those first couple of years, even as we have added children and pets to our family. We have settled into a kind of rhythm, a relaxed pace where we all have time to really enjoy each other. And a wonderful thing has happened: the garden has ceased to be “mine” and has become “ours.”

The girls, as they grew, instantly took to gardening. What toddler or preschooler doesn't like to play in dirt and water? But they also delight in seedlings, in noticing how things grow, in munching fresh carrots or peas from the garden or picking small bouquets to play “princess” with.

But the best thing has been having my husband become almost as obsessed with the garden as I am. Any given evening will find both of us devouring a book or magazine about gardening, interrupting one another's reading as we come across something we might want to try in our own garden. Where we once spent time talking about work or extended family annoyances, we talk about our garden.

And, just as with the rest of our marriage, our individual strengths complement each other. He takes great joy in keeping detailed records of everything from rainfall and how long we watered to when things germinated and how long it took. These are things I've always been haphazard about, things I knew I should do, things that would make gardening easier, but I never did them. He focuses on building things for the garden: cold frames, hoop houses, trellises and compost bins. I am, shall we say, not-so-talented when it comes to that whole “measuring before you build” thing. He tempers my tendency to do too much with his patient, laid back attitude, and his desire to do things the right way, the first time.

Gardening has become even more of a joy, now that my entire family is obsessed. The girls have their own garden, my husband and I care for everything together, and at the end of the day, we all straggle into the house, dirty fingernails and muddy knees, part of a team that works together in the garden and out of it.

This is a post in which I will rant a little, and rave a little, and possibly use a few swear words, and I have the distinct feeling that most of you will understand where I'm coming from.

Remember last week, when I shared my plans for expanding the veggie-growing capacity of my ever-evolving side yard? And how I mentioned that this is the best it's ever looked, with morning glories covering the chain link fence and cukes and bush beans growing happily along the ground and up the fence? I remarked that it is "charming without trying to be." What I hope you got from that post, what I said without saying it, was that it made me happy. That every time I looked at that part of my yard, I'd nod to myself, and think, that's what my garden is supposed to look like.

So you can imagine the heartbreak when I took the kids outside one afternoon late last week to see it had mostly been ripped out by the neighbor on the other side of the fence.

Where gem-like 'Grandpa Ott' morning glories greeted the dawn, there was nothing left but rusted chain link and the remains of the stems that clung on to the last. Where lemon cucumbers had scrambled up onto the fence, there were the remnants of what the neighbor couldn't reach to pull out. All that remained were the things that couldn't easily be reached from over the fence.

Carnage. Complete and total carnage.

I probably had something akin to murder in my eyes, because my husband immediately went into "let's avert a neighborhood war" mode. The neighbors (who, I might add, have a pile of garbage and weeds taller than the neighboring garage growing all over her yard....) had a handyman over that day to mow the lawn and take care of a few other things. Apparently, ripping out all of the plants on the fence and leaving the huge tree-like weeds in the rest of the yard was on his to-do list. I promised not to confront the neighbor directly. It is true---we have to live here, and neither one of us is going anywhere for some time to come. And it's not clear if it is her fence or mine. I'm pretty positive it's mine, but I still have to track down the surveyor's drawings to be sure.

So I didn't confront her directly. But I do believe I've made my displeasure known. It's easy to do when people have their windows open and you launch profanity filled rants about people's ugly-ass yards who screw around with plants that are actually improving the neighborhood rather than making it look like shit, and how if people got their lazy asses outside once in a while to weed the parts of their yards that actually need it, they might start to appreciate how much work it takes to make a garden look good.

Yes, I was quite pissed.

In true Colleen fashion, after the anger died down, I cried. Is it pathetic to cry over plants, and annual plants at that? It might be, but it is what it is. When you take time to nurture something, when you've looked at it daily and watched it evolve from mere seeds to full, lush, colorful plants, it's personal. And only a gardener would understand that.

I want to revisit the "whose fence is it?" issue, because it's really the only thing that kept me from marching over there and launching a full verbal tirade against this particular neighbor. As I said, it may not be my fence, and if it isn't, she was fully within her rights to rip stuff off of it. But what this comes to is a basic difference between gardeners and non-gardeners. As a gardener, if a neighbor put a bunch of love into growing something on the fence, even if it was my fence (which I wasn't using for anything) I'd be thrilled to death to have something pretty covering it. If I saw this neighbor out weeding and watering and planting day after day, the very last thing I'd do would be to rip it out without a word of warning, letting them make the grim discovery after the deed was already done. That is just not something you do. There is something so wrong about that that I can't even begin to understand the reasoning behind it.

Maybe I'm looking at it too much from a gardener's point-of-view, and maybe that is the problem. The world is not full of gardeners, unfortunately. The world is full of people who don't give a rat's ass about beauty or life or the health of the planet. It's full of people who think that beauty lies in swaths of lawn that never end, that all it takes to get there is hours of mowing and the magic of chemicals from a hose-end sprayer. In general, it's full of people who just don't get it.

Thank whatever deity or force of nature is responsible for creating gardeners. The world would be a pretty ugly place without them.

There's been a bit of a friendly debate going on in the blogosphere about whether gardening is hard work or not as hard as non-gardeners would believe. I am of the opinion, as the recipient of more sore muscles, bug bites, cuts, and other miscellaneous garden-related injuries than I care to remember (not to mention the occasional sunburn) that gardening is damn hard work. Sod busting, double digging, turning a too-wet compost pile, spreading wheelbarrows full of mulch and compost---all of it is hard work.

If I wanted a relaxing hobby, I'd take up knitting.

I love working hard. I love feeling totally exhausted at the end of the day, knowing that I made the most of the day I was given. Some days, I'm mentally tired. I've written so many words that speaking them takes more energy than it's worth. I have talked, emailed, conference-called, and IM-ed myself out, in addition to being there to listen to my preschoolers and give my baby all of the silly noises and baby talk she deserves. Those days, I can't wait to curl up on the couch with my husband after the kids are asleep, and just be. Other days, muscles that I didn't know I had throb and stiffen, and nothing but a hot shower and a good night's sleep will do. Kim mentioned this: that maybe it's her peasant roots or something, that she enjoys hard work. As Kim and I have found over the years, we have a lot in common. This is just one more thing.

Gardening (and writing, for that matter) is not for the genteel, faint-of-heart among us. Success at either one requires energy, dedication, and long, hard hours. And every bit of it is worth it. For all of the work that I put into my garden, I am rewarded with beauty, fresh produce, wildlife outside my door, and the serenity that comes with being the steward of something so precious. Do you ever have those moments when you step into your garden, and you just feel grateful to be there? You are amazed that all of this is yours, and you wonder how you got so lucky. Those moments make every ache, pain, cut, and bruise worth it.

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I'll be posting even more sporadically than usually for the next month or so here at ITGO. Writing is keeping me insanely busy, as is the new baby (Happy 3 Month Birthday, Elizabeth!) and the rest of my wonderful family. In addition, I got two wonderful, amazing, life-changing pieces of news in the past week, and it will take me a while to figure out how everything is going to fit in. I'll be sharing those with you in time, but right now, I feel like a kid with a couple of new toys. I want to delight in them all by myself for a while. Once I get used to them, I'll share. I promise

If you're really, really missing me, please visit me over at About Organic Gardening. I maintain a fairly regular blog over there. The content is somewhat different from these meandering posts, but it's still me. You can help me liven up my community over at About. Trust me, it needs it!

August is not the most pleasant month around here. We're still in for plenty of hot, humid weather, and the rains we enjoy through June and some of July become few and far between. In August, most years, my lawn finally gives up trying to look good and goes dormant, only to wake again in September when cooler weather prevails. Come to think of it, I'm pretty much the same way.

But August is good for the vegetable garden, which is really producing now, and very, very good for our little butterfly garden. This space has the vegetable garden on one side (behind the picket fence) and the kids' play area on the other, so we wanted something tough, colorful, and fun for the kids. In early summer, chives, foxgloves, and poppies bloom here. Now, the rudbeckia, agastache, and buddleia are in full swing, along with calendula, bachelor buttons, and zinnias. There is actually a liatris behind that large clump of agastache, but I'm going to move it this fall to a more visible spot. The agastache is just so happy there.

In reality, this garden seems to attract bees more than anything else. They spend all day buzzing between the agastache blooms. But, now that the buddleia is blooming, the monarchs that have been flitting around lately will stay a little longer. I do need to get some milkweed in this bed, or nearby. I haven't had much luck with wintersowing it, and the 'Cinderella' that I did manage to sow successfully seems to be a dud. I don't think I've seen a single butterfly near it. I'll give wintersowing one more shot this year, but if I don't manage to get some milkweed, I'm throwing in the towel and buying some.

It's a packed little spot, but it works. I rarely have to weed here, and it has done wonderfully in our recent dry weather even though I hardly ever water. And I know why: this was the lasagna bed that I built last fall. These plants are growing in some really nice, moisture retentive soil. It has me sold on the lasagna gardening method, and I built another one behind the garage to expand that vegetable garden. Actually, it's already hosting several volunteer tomato plants that I planted there temporarily until I found a better spot. But they're fruiting and growing happily, even in the partially-decomposed materials, so I'll leave them.

But, that's another post, and for now we're supposed to be enjoying my little butterfly garden.

What parts of your garden are at their best right now? And which plants are you loving for late-summer color? We'd love to hear about it!

This is prime cucumber season here in my neck of the woods, and my own garden is producing beautifully. When it comes to cucumbers, my personal belief is that the simpler they are served, the better. Is there anything more refreshing than a cucumber, sliced and consumed with nothing but perhaps a bit of salt? A green salad is nothing without the cucumber, and gazpacho wouldn't be nearly as fabulous without that clean, crisp cucumber flavor in the background.

But today we're here to talk about how to use cucumbers in one of my favorite summertime beverages, Minty Cucumber-Orange Water. It takes two ingredients that are going full steam right now (mint and cukes) and marries them with sweet citrus-y goodness for a truly refreshing drink. Here's how to make it:

Ingredients:

• 1 large cucumber


• 1 seedless orange


• 15 to 20 mint leaves (I used spearmint, but most mints would probably work. Pineapple mint is also very good in this recipe.)


• Water


Simply peel the cucumber and split it lengthwise. Using a spoon, remove the seeds from the center of the cucumber halves. You don't have to do this, but I find that when I don't remove the seeds, there's just too much debris floating around in the water. After removing the seeds, thinly slice the cukes on the diagonal.

Next, thinly slice an orange.

Add the cucumber and orange slices to a pitcher, as well as your mint leaves. I like to leave the mint whole. It is easier to strain out later.





Fill the pitcher with water, and refrigerate for several hours or overnight. This gives the ingredients time to fully infuse the water with flavor. Before you serve, simply pour the water through a strainer to remove the cukes, oranges, and mint. Serve with a fresh orange slice and a sprig of mint, and you have a very refreshing drink. It is perfect for reviving yourself after gardening, or for serving with a light dinner.


This post is my contribution to Thursday Food Fests, which is sponsored by A Way to Garden and Dinner Tonight. This week's theme was Zukes and Cukes. Check both sites for more fabulous ways to savor the season's bounty!