Garden Week #2: Are We There Yet?

Well, it's all in. I think. I have tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers, carrots, and about five different kinds of flowers planted. (My kids got to pick for their own squares and they apparently like flowers better than vegetables. Big surprise there.) My trellis for the tomatoes and cucumbers is ready and waiting, and I've been careful to make sure they all have enough water. Actually, that wasn't so hard seeing as we got all this unusual rain this last week.

Now it's just a matter of waiting to see the tiny little sprouts from the seeds proving that this was not all just an expensive failure. OK, that sounds terribly pessimistic. After all, I planted actual tomato and strawberry plants, not seeds, so there is something growing, as long as it doesn't die on me. But I feel like a little kid. Every day (sometimes twice a day) I have been kneeling next to my little squares and peering intently at the dirt, hoping to see even a little speck of green working through the surface. It feels like I've been getting disappointed every single day. I'd even begun to wonder if maybe all our seeds were duds or something. (Like when you're hoping for something special to come in the mail, and you keep checking and checking and it's never there, and you begin to wonder if it got lost, and then you begin to curse the postal service, and then you wonder if the people ever sent it, finally you despair of ever seeing the dratted letter or package. . . ).

Then, at last, some success! In one little square, one of J's flowers has a teensy, weensy little sprout peeking through the dirt. You practically need a magnifying glass to see it, but it's there. Proof that I did something right. Or J did. May it be the first of many sprouts to come!