sweet pea delight

spent some time in the garden today. the woman at the nursery told me it was almost too late to plant sweet peas and i wanted to get the seeds in the ground lickety split. eva and i planted three packets of sweet peas {nearly} between the two of us. when they are ready to bloom it will be an amazing sweet pea delight out there.

we also planted snap peas and sugar snap peas and chard. i cleaned up the kale areas {yes there are multiple kale plantings!} and was amazed at just how prolific the california poppies have been. wow. there will be so many poppies this year even with me pulling them out left and right to make room for the mesclun and radicchio. i have made great progress here- the freedom to pull plants and the freedom to leave them to grow. there was a time not too long ago when i experimented with leaving every plant there, never pulling anyone up, never thinning, never culling. there was a time before that when i pulled up so many plants just because that is how you garden. and now. freedom. freedom to pull the plants and freedom to let them grow wherever they find themselves. a nice way to be. a nice way to enjoy my time in the garden. with the plants.

this translates well when i am working with the kids in the garden. there was a time when i would have let my kids plant anything anywhere they chose and i worried and fretted and was nervous about the whole set up. and another period of time when i lectured about the right place to plant a plant, the best way to do a thing. and now? a little of both but hopefully a whole lot more of seeing the big picture and letting go of the outcome. a few pea plants feeling crowded is small price to pay for spending the whole afternoon in the spring sunshine with eva chatting away to me about how different we are from the worms. momma, you are right, we are surely not worms. look at them move through the earth. if i buried myself down there like they do, i would never breathe again. and a little information about pea plants liking their space doesn't hurt either. particularly when we are both smiling at the prospect of planting more sweet peas when we finish with the chard...