the pain of gardening

I feel sore all over today. My shoulder aches, my wrist hurts, and even my arm has had better days. My leg is stiff and my back would like to kill me.

I am sore, but it's a good sore.

Yesterday, the girls and I spent a few hours at a garden plot we rent for $15 dollar a year. With the girls' help, over the last two days, I have turned the soil in about half a 20-by-20 plot, dug trenches and piled a hill, gives eleven tomato and three zucchini plants their new homes, and sowed four half-rows of corn.

And when I say that I did this with the girls' help, I am not exaggerating. They didn't do any of the spading, obviously, but they did pitch in at an age-appropriate level. When I pulled weeds out from the soil, they both ran the roots back to the compost pile, and they also disposed of the old sunflower stalks.

And let's not forget their eagerness to help plant the plants we already started. I honestly had to make them take turns digging holes by hand for the zucchini. I'm hoping that this translates into a desire for zucchini later in the summer, or at least into a willingness to eat it.

They've been just as involved in the gardening at home, where a sizeable portion of the yard has been converted to one flower bed after another. This is especially true of the front yard, where I have no fewer than six flower beds, although I'll concede that three of them have run together into one giant spread of color.

Directly in front of the house, running from the stoop on the right to the driveway on the left , is the first bed. This one has an azalea and rhododendron, two peonies, a hibiscus, three ferns, a mass or two of daffodils, and a handful of annuals that this year are sunflowers that Ruthie planted.

On the opposite side of the stoop, running down to the sidewalk, is a gardening bed where I grow my lettuce and some broccoli for easy picking, a strawberry patch that has a few dozen flowers, and a few wildflowers. Evangeline had such a fun time planting annuals with me on Saturday that I let her plant six impatiens of her very own in the back, directly by the stoop.

Next to the sidewalk, one touching the driveway and the other touching the walkway to the stoop, are two triangular beds where I grow daffodils, irises and hyacinths. The flowers on these have died back now, but the area is blanketed with a cover of myrtle.

And smack in the middle of the yard is a raised bed where I grow some mums and whatever annuals we happen to fancy that particular year. This year, the girls chose petunias with three different flower colors and some impatiens. The girls and I spent a nice chunk of last week digging holes all around the front yard for these flowers, and we still have a few other annuals and perennials to find homes for.

I'm telling you, this has been a great springtime for me, and for them. I'm enjoying spending the time with them, and they're not only catching my passion for organic gardening, they're developing a sense of pride and ownership in what we produce. That also will give them a greater appreciation of the environment and a greater connection to the ebb and flow of the seasons and how that affects us.

I feel sore all over today from the work, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.