Gardening and Knitting, hand in hand.

Someone asked me the other day about my garden, if it was just flowers or vegetables.  I understand the question.  For some people, there is only one way to garden, and just what that way is often depends on whether you live in the country or the city. 

Just as I love to see something pop of my needles, I love to grow things.  To see something pop out of the ground because you placed it there is so rewarding.  Beats the heck out of the joy of a clean kitchen or a pile of tidy laundry.  These are fleeting victories at best.  Growing things is a whole season of victories and fills the whole year.  Even on the darkest days of winter you can plan your garden.  And you can plan it while knitting!

I’ve always had a garden of some kind or other.  Mr.Needles and I have worked out buns off to take our plain, scraggly grassed, sloped yard and turned it into an oasis of gentle green beauty.  I love it the same way I love knitting shawls and fancy scarves.  They are challenge and beauty and delicacy.  This shade gardening and delicate knitting are things that touch and uplift a soul.

But vegetable gardening is staple.  It is a nothing fancy sort of gardening with solid results.  It doesn’t fill your spirit but rather your tummy.   Vegetable gardening is the sock knitting of the gardening world.  Simple. Prosaic.  Pedestrian.  Just the ordinary things you need every day.  And we all know how much I love sock knitting.  Plain simple April socks sort of gardening is what I am after.

I love my sock knitting but if it was only socks or only shawls, forever, it would eventually feel just a little empty.  To fill only my spirit in my gardening leaves me feeling just a little empty too.  I have filled my spirit with my gardening but failed to  know the joy of feeding my household. 

This new garden is going to restore some balance to the equation, gardening and knitting, hand in hand.