Last year, just before Thanksgiving, Lyle and I moved to a newly built house. The mature trees surrounding the house hadn’t yet lost all their leaves, so we were able to identify a few of them. But the young trees and shrubs planted in the front yard were already dormant. We settled into our new home over the winter, unpacking and organizing, buying furniture we didn’t think we would need, and mostly leaving the bright white walls alone.
Now it’s spring, and we’re spending time outside on our screened-in porch and in the yards working.
In the front yard, we’ve planted herb pots on the front porch, and we’re enjoying daily surprises of stems, buds, and blossoms in the landscaping. The backyard, however, is a different story. It’s an oddly shaped lawn, spreading away from the house at an angle. Outside the fence, old trees like complex storylines rise from the brush sloping into a ravine. But the backyard is just a yard.
Our last backyard had a large garden. The first summer there, we cleared out abandoned strawberry plants and weeds. Over the second summer, we planted zucchini, hot peppers, and sunflowers. We appreciated the garden, but the zucchini plants attracted lots of insects, and our plant placement was difficult to manage. Each week, we harvested overgrown zucchinis as big as a fireplace log.
The next summer, we planted a well-organized, glorious combination of classic summer wonders: wildflowers, sunflowers, cherry tomatoes, slicing tomatoes, and several types of peppers. We sowed the wildflower seeds into the center bed. The seeds were a year old, and we weren’t sure whether they’d grow. When the perimeter tomato and pepper plants started to take shape, the center bed seedlings didn’t. Lyle and I talked about digging up the sprouts. They looked more like weeds than intentional plants, but we waited. We decided to let them grow and nurture them.
In time, our backyard turned heavenly. Sunflowers blocked clouds overhead, and wildflowers twisted like a vibrant puzzle, eventually bowing to the tomatoes and peppers. By late summer, almost every night we filled a serving bowl with ripe, warm, color-saturated fruits and vegetables and picked a vase of flowers.
Nearly every day, I made a simple batch of pico de gallo with chopped, freshly harvested tomatoes and serrano peppers, minced shallot, and sea salt. We enjoyed it with tortilla chips and any type of Mexican food, but also on breakfast scrambles with sauteed greens and chopped vegetables, smoked turkey, and cheese. Since salsa is one of my favorite snacks, I also ate the pico de gallo on its own, with a spoon.
When we moved, we had to say goodbye to that beloved garden, but we knew we’d build and plant a new one. The time to plant has come. We’re planning an extensive backyard landscape, including an extended patio, mulched beds with trees, shrubs, and flowers, and a garden.
Our backyard project won’t be finished until mid- to late summer, so we planted a potted garden on the back patio with tomatoes and peppers. We packed the soil in the pots loosely, hoping the plants will develop strong roots and grow more fruit. And we scattered wildflower and sunflower seeds mixed with soil over the fence, hoping to grow flowers in the surrounding brush.
We were comfortable in our last house. But when we saw in our new home what we had hoped to update and fix in our last one, packing and undoing what we’d spent two years and three months working on seemed worthwhile. We chose an adventure. Now we’re learning new roads and weather patterns, new distances to familiar destinations. We’re not yet fully moved in, but we’re making progress. I don’t know what the potted garden will teach us, but I know that in loose soil, we, too, are growing.
