Tuesday, January 31, 2017

31 Winter in the School Garden

The borage is luminous in the winter light. All those days of rain, have brought tremendous growth to our California gardens, and Maria's school garden is more lush and enticing than ever. The Junior Master Gardeners finally caught a break between storms, so they could meet in the garden, and do what they do best... learn, share, tend the beds, make improvements, and make plans.

Karen and Maria, going over a few of the projects Maria has completed in the course book. Maria participates in a lot of extracurricular programs that she enjoys, but JMG is sacrosanct! We are both thankful for the opportunities she relishes in the program, especially as it means time spent with her lifelong friend, Mrs Snacky.

Large leaf basil seeds.

Blossoms of the fava beans.

While the JMG crew sowed seeds for the plant sale, and discussed more plans for summer and fall garden beds, I went around taking pictures of the winter beds... the chard, the peas, the wildly successful fava bean plants. Then I tucked myself into a spot beside the nasturtiums and began pulling weeds, which are plentiful, too, after all of the rain. I was alone with my thoughts, happy ones, because I enjoy the meditation in weed pulling. Such contentment, serenity... it was absorbing, which is probably why it took me so long to finally realize that I was not actually alone!

Only a few feet away, curled up like a ball of sunshine, Garden Cat, the sage fellow. He did not mind me one bit. He doesn't seem to mind much of anything, which is nice. Birds, children, peas and gnomes are his friends. We cannot ask the mice what they think, because no one has seen any in quite some time. He snoozed, contentedly, and I pulled weeds, in the same happy frame of mind.

With Infinity More Monkeys, a picture a day.

2 comments:

Tracy said...

Hi, Natalie! Your Marie has become sooo grown up! What a joy to see your kids, your garden and all the happy there. And Garden Cat, oh, how he looks like our Charlie! Sadly we lost our Charlie to cancer the end of last year, it was so sad. But we have a new kitty now--our little Luna's been with us almost a week now! So good having 4 paws around! I was offline for stretches of time the latter half of last year, life was so painful for a while. I did try to keep up with friends, though I wasn't always clever at leaving comments. Trying to do better with that now. ;) It's good to be back in blogland. And life is flowing more sweetly now. Happy Days to you all there!

Jennifer said...

Borage! What a wonderful memory!!