Goodbye Garden

We bought a new house a few weeks ago, about 40 miles from here, and have been spending a few weekdays and every weekend since moving odds and ends, miscellaneous boxes, and fragile items we didn't want to put into the moving truck.

We came from a fixer-upper farm house, which did me in soon after refinishing the entire stair case and restoring a stained glass window. But our new house is truly new -- brand spankin' new. We don't need to paint, refinish, tile, stain, sand, drywall, or putty a single nook or cranny.

We donated our furniture to a local charity and have yet to buy new, so we've been sitting on lawn chairs in the living room and dining on two small wiggly, unstable card tables pushed together. Our dining chairs consist of my office swivel, an oddball chair from our travels through Belgium, and a child's step stool.



As I was packing up the car this afternoon for our weekend away at the new house, I caught a glimpse of our backyard garden -- the poor thing. You may recall, we started out of the gate like gangbusters, growing seeds in our recycled coffee cans. After a call to the manufacturer, we discovered the cans were coated with BPA. We quickly replanted the seedlings in the ground, but leaf miners ate their way through everything, and many of the young plants didn't make it.

The only survivors were the lettuce (pictured above), our 5-year-old rosemary bush, Greek oregano, chives and thyme. I'm going to pick the lettuce tonight, and once we find a good spot for our new garden, we'll carefully transplant the surviving herbs.

I never thought I'd be so emotionally attached to a garden, but I find myself choking back tears when I think of leaving it behind. The garden has always been small and often unproductive. Yet, I love that little space -- it's brought me peace when times were crazy, and although no vegetables, it's given us years of beautiful rosemary and oregano, and it's provided us with excitement and hope when we plant new seeds every spring.



I'm not sure where we'll plant our new garden yet, but I'm excited to start planning. And then I suppose introductions will be in order, much like we did with our new neighbors: old plants, meet new plants. Get along and happily carry on.