The garden is growing and it's almost magical to me! Above are the snap pea sprouts and below is the lettuce/ spinach/ chard with a few cauliflower and broccoli plants at the end. What used to be a big dark pile of dirt with some tiny seeds is now sprouting up and starting to look like vegetable plants. Even if we don't produce a very big crop this year, our garden is connecting me to food production in a new way.

I planted these seeds and seedlings with a sentiment of mystery, wondering if the food we rely on from the grocery store could really grow up in our own backyard. I know, I know, we all learned this concept in kindergarten, while watching our pumpkin seed sprout in a cup. But it's not the plant biology that's a mystery to me, its the 'growing food because you want to eat it' concept that is still new to me. When I started trying to plan out a vegetable garden that might actually produce a lot of the things we eat on a regular basis, I had the feeling that it couldn't be that easy. Surely there were complicated processes and procedures and technologies that were necessary to produce the kind of veggies I buy at the store. Maybe my soil wouldn't be right or the sun wouldn't shine just so or the seeds would require special heat lamps or something.

So far... there have been no complicated technologies or expert procedures taking place and the seeds are becoming vegetables! In fact, all of the garden work has been done with my 3 year old and 1 1/2 year old working by my side, poking seeds in not-so-straight lines, digging things up when I'm not looking and then re-planting them together, watering one seedling a lot and dashing a sprinkle past the others. So when I look at the new snap pea plants with their spindly vines starting to reach out, I just kind of giggle with a sense of nature's amazing strength. When I inspect the shiny lettuce leaves, I feel little bit of empowerment well-up inside me as a small kitchen-garden farmer who might be able to provide veggies for my family even if we lived in a place that didn't have a giant supermarket nearby. And when I pull out a few weeds from around the onions, I feel a little more of a sense of freedom because I'm a tad bit less dependent on a large farm industry that's not always so fair to farmers or to the environment or to consumers.

In an over-eager and excited moment the other day, I even pulled a few lettuce and spinach leaves off for a salad... and they were good.