Resolution

My past new year's resolutions have ranged from the woefully tame (no overdue library books!) to the overtly feminist (read only books by female authors!) to the physically demanding (run one 5K per month!). Right after the turning of this new year, relishing the last couple of weeks of winter break before beginning the second half of my third year of graduate school, I poured through Barbara Kingsolver's genuinely inspiring Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. If there is ever a wrong and frustrating time of the year to read a book about growing things from seed and cultivating a connection with simplicity, the Earth and the out-of-doors, it's January. Cold, grey, bleary January. You find yourself daydreaming about your imaginary thicket of aromatic herbs, gorgeous melons and ruby tomatoes warming in the sun, but outside the sky looks cranky and the ground is frozen solid. Still, the book sparked a curious excitment in me. How much of our own food could we grow this year? I made a resolution to find out.

We have no grandiose illusions about our gardening skill set, and we fully admit that they're of the rookie variety. And of course there's the issue of space: Nick and I live in small city neighborhood with small city lots, which pretty much precludes any sort of large scale veggie and fruit growing shennanigans. But people grow their own food and flowers in the smallest and sometimes craziest of ways, right? Right.

Maybe it was good afterall that we stumbled onto this idea in January because it gave us time to read up and prepare a game plan. Or three. What is undeniable is that we are genuinely looking forward to making an intentional effort this summer to slow down and defrag from years of stretching ourselves doubly across work and graduate school. This summer marks the first in several years that we've both been class-free. Ahhh... Next fall will pull us back in to the cyclone of grad-school-induced senility (with an extra 21 hr/week internship for Rhianna; yep, you read that correctly--on top of work AND school) thrown in for an extra unavoidable measure of madness. So, in the meantime, we are focusing on distilling life to its most basic and enjoyable.

Our plan: slow down, get a bit dirty and enjoy simplicity. Oh, and we're bringing you along with us. Welcome to A Brave New Garden.

xo,
R&N