Summer gardening

Every year for an eternity, or so it seems to me, rain blankets the greater Seattle area. My children have left home, my husband works, and I’m dragging my feet on getting back in the workforce (it’s been decades) or enrolling in some new courses at the local community college. In a perfect world, I get my MFA in writing and publish the novel I’ve pecked at for 20 years. Until that happens, I spend months every year sitting by my living room window, reading Oprah’s latest suggestion, waiting for the sun so that I can start gardening in earnest.

I love gardening, have loved it since I was a young girl, learning from my late mom how to cultivate flowers, grow many different kinds of vegetables and why homegrown fruit tastes infinitely better than store-bought, pesticide-ridden farm creations. Today, I grow everything from red tomatoes to black berries in my garden.

The beginning of June is typically when the break in weather occurs, and rain clouds are banished from Seattle, save for an occasional appearance, through the end of August. Some people garden in the rain around here, but I don’t enjoy it, a byproduct I suppose of growing up in California, where it’s perfectly sunny a solid 50 percent of the year and prolonged storms prompt public protests (I think.) So I wait for the summer months, where I spend almost every morning tending to my garden.

The reason I garden in the mornings dates to my upbringing in California where July afternoons are almost oppressively hot and solid work in the soil rarely happens past 10 a.m. While it’s almost never necessary to beat the heat in Seattle, force of habit is somewhat comforting, and morning gardening makes me think of my mom (she died ten years ago, and I still miss her.) Plus, I’m a morning person at heart.