Earthy woman?

When I was in grade school, my favorite books were Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books.  I read all of them several times.  I also loved Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, in which two girls are shipwrecked and land on an island with four babies in their care.  I have always imagined myself as a pioneer, someone who would thrive while living off the land, living a simple, elemental life, growing and preserving my own food, making what I needed, needing only the basic supplies.  This has been a big part of my self-image.

When Sweet Hubby and I bought this house, my first to own, I was delighted that it came with a large backyard, full of potential.  SH got right to work and planted a patch of raspberry canes, and later a row of blueberry bushes.  He build four garden boxes and planted lettuces, onions, cucumbers, strawberries, scallions, tomatoes.  When he built our deck, he planted all kinds of herbs and flowers in boxes.  It turns out he can be quite a gardener.

Imagine my surprise to find out that I am not.  I was happy to go out and pick what he grew, but I never got my hands dirty.  Not once.  I am, I fear, not a woman of the earth at all.  If I had to survive in the wild, as in my fantasies, I would last maybe 2 days; 4 if there were fresh water available.

Eventually SH's attention turned to other interests.  The raspberries still come back every year, and the blueberry bushes are doing well.  But the garden boxes have, for a long time now, been nothing but dirt covered with black tarp, and the wood forming the boxes has begun to rot.

Recently I crossed paths with a neighbor of ours who runs a landscaping business, and I impulsively asked her to come to our house to advise me how to get a garden going in those sad, neglected boxes.  I figured I ought to give gardening at least a one year try on to see if my image of myself is a complete sham or simply unexplored.

What I got from Sally Ann turned out to be a lot more than I had bargained for.  She immediately saw the possibilities in this big piece of land, and helped me imagine, bit by bit, what a glorious place it could be.  She addressed not just the garden beds, which will need to be completely rebuild and reconfigured, but imagined a hedgerow along the back of the yard, a rain garden, meadow plants to replace the sad, rough grass, paths curving throughout the yard, cleaning up the mess around the shed.

I am absolutely thrilled with this new vision of what our yard can be.  Not only will it be so much more beautiful and fruitful for us, but it will no doubt add greatly to the resale value of the house, should we decide to move at some point.  It has been in the back of my mind for a long time to make this one of our home projects, but neither SH nor I have ever taken the initiative to get it going.  That moment of casually bumping into Sally Ann has turned out to be what might possibly be the start of a new (and probably expensive) chapter in the years-long project of turning this house and its grounds into a home that it truly ours and truly beautiful.