The Happiness Project

As you know, this blog is dedicated to book reviews. You may have been wondering why my posts are sparse at times. Well, in honor of the book I am currently trying to write about, I wanted to show you my "happiness project". 

My Garden

In April of 2008, I bought the empty 1/3 acre across the street from my home. I wish I had a picture to show you of what it looked like then but I don't. It had a broken down fence around it, a few scraggly trees, a huge pile of weeds that the neighbor had scrapped together, trash, and gravel strewn across it. 

I remember the first day we worked on it. I had news that the sale was going through and so on General Conference weekend, I took my boys out and we cleaned up trash between sessions. I'm sure they were less than thrilled but I was in heaven. A family project! What can be better?

Next, my boys and I and the neighbor kids burned the pile of weeds, and what an adventure that was! When I say pile, I don't mean a little pile, like the one you make with your leaves in the fall. This pile was about 40 feet across and 4 feet high in some places. The pile had been there for quite some time and if I'd been smart I would have poured a ring of gasoline around the whole pile, but I wasn't smart. As we set one end on fire, dozens of mice ran out of the other side. It was mayhem. A dog, a cat and a bunch of kids all chasing mice. Meanwhile, I was trying to make sure this gigantic fire didn't get out of control and set a neighboring house on fire. We didn't have water on the property yet and so we were using the neighbor's hose. She didn't realize that the plumbing had a leak in it and while we were happily spraying the perimeter, water was spraying in her basement. Oh no! 

We pulled down the old fence, cleaned up the trash, dug out the trees, and scraped off the gravel. I had a contractor friend come and put up a new fence and gate and bring city water to the property. I brought in a couple of loads of manure. I had it tilled and laser leveled. Then I planted. The first year I planted about 10 rows all the way across. On the east side, almost everything died. I attribute it to the bad compost that was dumped on that side, and also that was where the majority of the gravel was. The next year, I was going to plant only on the west side but I had remarried to a man named Mr. Know-it-all-and-we're-going-to-do-it-my-way. He didn't want to hear anything I had to say about it, cuz he thought he was the expert gardener. Even though he had gardened in lush green Idaho and this was Utah, where the climate, soil, and insects are different. Even though he had only grown small gardens and mine had always been larger. So, not wanting to fight, I shut my mouth. I got my revenge a little later as he was showing me how you how hoe your trenches--by hand. The soil was hard and it was a lot of work. So I just watched him. Then when he was on the second to last row, I said, "Gee that would be a lot easier if we used my tiller first to soften up the soil." He was mad but it was oh so worth it! Then when the east half of the garden started dying, I got to hear him whine about it. When I finally told him that everything had died on that side the year before, he was mad that I hadn't told him. I reminded him that he didn't want my input. Anyway. I finally let him know that he really wasn't welcome out there because it was my place of peace and refuge. He honored that, EXCEPT for the sunflowers.

He insisted that we plant a row of sunflowers. Now understand, that when your garden is a 1/3 of an acre, a row is pretty long. Maybe it was only half a row but it was still 75 sunflowers. Yep, that's what I said. 75. I am not a sunflower seed person. I am not one of those people who buys packets of them still in the shell and spits the shells all over the place as they eat them. I buy them shelled at about $1.50 a pound and count myself blessed that I don't have to shell the silly things. But he thinks they are so cool and if one sunflower is cool, then a whole row of them must be cooler. Yeah, sunflowers are cool, Except that they take a lot of water. Except when our Delta winds blow. Except when the birds want to eat them. Except when the weather foils your plans. Except when it comes time to harvest them. I paid the water bill, not him. And when the wind blew, we had to go out and stake them up so they wouldn't blow over.  I was fine with letting the birds have them but he was not good about sharing and so we went out and covered all 75 heads with plastic grocery sacks.  Then it rained and the heads started getting moldy inside the bags and so while he was at a conference,  he called and instructed me to go out and take the bags off. Grrrrrrrrrr! Then with winter coming on and a storm blowing in, we harvested the heads and threw them onto a tarp and wheeled them into the garage in the wheel barrow. As we were doing so, he instructed us on how WE-- meaning me and my boys-- would go about getting the seeds off the heads. "Wait a minute!" I said. "This was your idea and I told you that I wasn't going to harvest all those seeds, right from the beginning. You can harvest them yourself." Guess what? They rotted in the wheelbarrow. The birds didn't even get to eat any. And we saved the damn stalks too because he thought they would come in handy someday. HA! I should have sharpened one of them and used it as a spear. But divorce papers worked too.

Meanwhile, the garden is mine again, and it is my happy place. Nothing is better than getting up at sunrise and going out to the cool of the garden and working, watering, pulling weeds, harvesting, talking to the plants, to myself, to the bees, to the neighbors cat, and to God. Thank you God for blessing me with a garden.