I’m not really a career person. I’m a gardener, basically. ~George Harrison

I’ve never been good with plants.  Ask my mom, she’ll tell you.  The only times I’ve ever been successful with plants and gardens and grass and all that green stuff has been when I had something to prove.

Mom and I re-did our entire front yard on Maui many years ago.  We’d moved into a house that was surrounded by Hawaiian Hibiscus bushes.  Which could have been really cool – except I was VERY allergic to Hawaiian Hibiscus.  Asthma attack allergic.  The first week in that house was total misery.

One morning, after another sleepless night spent hacking and wheezing and puffing on my inhaler, I willed myself to do something about the hibiscus problem.  I took a whole bunch of bronkaid and prednisone, threw an inhaler in each pocket, grabbed some thick gardening gloves and a shovel, and went to work.  I spent about ten hours that day, pulling up every hibiscus bush around the property.  Did you know that Hawaiian Hibiscus bushes have roots that wrap around one another and reach sixty miles deep [exaggeration]?  Well, now you know.  It was one of the hardest and most satisfying jobs I’ve ever done.

After my yard massacre, the property was a total mess.  It looked horrible, and I think we might have even gotten an angry call from the landlord.  So mom and I went to work.  Over the following months, we painstakingly and lovingly took the front yard from its original condition (mostly sand and weeds), and turned it into a beautiful little oasis of our own, with lush lovely grass, a perimeter of marigolds (I’d heard they keep roaches away), gardenia, several new plumeria trees, and we revived some of the existing trees and bushes – a hybrid lemon-lime tree was my personal favorite.  Diseased and sad, but salvageable… we nursed that guy all the way to its first good fruit.

Man, that was fun.  So much hard work.  I wish we’d thought to get before and after photos.  We just wanted a pretty yard; I had no idea I’d be blogging about it twenty years later.  I don’t remember every flower and bush we planted, every tree harvested from cuttings or moved from the backyard.  I just remember standing on the sidewalk, admiring our hard work, thinking “We DID this!  WE DID THIS BY OURSELVES!!!”

Every good story has an ending.  This one ended with goats.  Remember, we were on Maui.

Our neighbors had goats.  They weren’t kind to the goats – they kept them penned up in a small run, barely fed them at all, beat them when they got too loud.  The young goats were kept for food, the older goats were kept to reproduce… for more food.  I hated it, and secretly planned to release the goats in the middle of the night, hoping they would run to a clearing somewhere, away from their terrible keepers.

I didn’t act fast enough.  The goats made it out on their own, but they didn’t run to a clearing.  They ran to our front yard.  And they ate it.  They ate every blade of grass, every flower, every sprout on every bush within a matter of minutes.  Mom and I stood at the front door, watching in horror as our gorgeous yard, hundreds of hours of backbreaking work, was chomped up and digested right before our eyes.

When they finished eating, the yard looked again like it had looked before we planted – sand and maybe a few grass blades here and there.  A wasteland.  I sat down on the front stoop, fuming.  One of the goats quietly trotted up to me, looking at me with those soulful eyes.  He took a spot to my left and leaned against me.  I like to think he was trying to comfort me.  I know that his weight against me, and the half-crazed, half-sorrowful look on his face erased my anger.  After all those months of worrying that the goats weren’t being cared for… at least I knew they finally got a good meal.

The goats  were rounded up and put back in their pen; mom and I cleaned up what we could and gave up gardening, and a few months later we moved to the mainland.  That was the end of my gardening life.

Until now!  There’s a new garden in my life, only this time I don’t have to tend to it… and there’s no threat of goats anywhere near.  The porch garden we blogged about earlier… is thriving!  In fact, it looks pretty awesome right now.  Mike is taking care of these plants, and he has the patience and love to do it right.  My gardening past was one of conquest; his has more soulful roots.  I have no doubt that we will soon enjoy ripe, delicious tomatoes,  hot peppers, cucumbers, and gorgeous salsas and pestos, all from this garden.  His garden.  Our garden.

I guess that was the longest way ever to introduce the latest photos of these plants, but on days like today I need to write.

My Mother’s Day present, a kidney bean planting from Ellie; cilantro and basil

potatoes, tomatoes, jalapenos

cucumbers, and the start of our green onions

Whew!  There you have it – today’s garden update!  Hopefully soon we’ll have photos of veggies to show.  In the meantime, you’ll just have to deal with my long winded stories and practically pointless reminiscing.

I never had any other desire so strong,
and so like to covetousness,
as that one which I have had always,
that I might be master at last
of a small house and a large Garden.
~Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666