Gardening, Sailing and Sugar

Garden dreaming, anyone? It's March, and in our house we have been dreaming of this year's garden since January. The unfair part is that last week, with temperatures in the 50s and 60s, we still were unable to plant anything as the ground was still frozen hard. Life in the Midwest does teach patience and perseverance. (I try to remember this when they are all complaining about missing the ocean and I am trying not to agree with them.) My daughter has been cultivating seedlings in her sunny bedroom since Christmas, when they each were given a baby Christmas tree in a pot. She began tomatoes, herbs and sunflowers shortly after that. They are doing very well, almost as nicely as mine which I started three days ago and are still in the dirt stage.

We did not make the cut for the island reef job. After a little disappointment, we were able to move on to our next project(s); camping and taking sailing lessons this summer and making the best square foot garden ever. We are wondering whether to add to our raised bed dirt that has sunk over the last three years, or dig up the weed cloth underneath and allow the roots to go deeper. Any advice from those who have tried the raised bed/weedcloth below option? It has been lovely having no weeds for the past few years, but nothing is thriving like it did before. I wonder if there is enough depth for proper root structure. Then again, my tomato plants did almost nothing last year either, and they were in the ground.

To help while away the time until I can dig and plant, I am reading Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" a must-read I kept forgetting to read, but will now harp upon until everyone I know has read it. There are so many pages I could quote from it that I can hardly choose, but it is the book of the moment, meeting the needs of our food-impoverished society as things stand now in the U.S. Go find it at the library, buy it, borrow it, read it, your life will be richer, the world will be a better place.

Along with food-consciousness has come sugar awareness, back again from the drawer I had stuffed its ugly self into. It really was time to bring it back out. Girl Scout cookie week notwithstanding, (rather hypocritical of me, since we've eaten all of the thin mints), this stuff is bad for me. I had three excellent reminders of just how bad over the weekend. This is reminder number four, so if three times is a charm, four will be a promise not to forget. The stuff makes me itch, swells my joints and makes me a grumpier person. "Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom" was one of my reminders, another was a friend who admitted that she used to yell, but she has not done so for a year now. When I asked her what her secret was, she answered, to my amazement; "no more sugar." Since that came less than half an hour after my research on my own health condition revealed I should cut out all refined sugar (something I already know), it had the impact of an oracle. Gosh am I glad the thin mints are gone!