Purple and Swollen

As you can see, we’ve decided on a small garden this year.

This is the lower garden, not on Cooter Hollow Proper, on a neighbor’s land, accessible via hike through the woods. It’s the one we water with My Native’s Amazing Hose Technique. Right now, it’s a (modest) pile of dirt. I’ll let you know if it starts writing novels or does something equally noteworthy.

Fishing season has opened and the ferns are up, which means we shared a recent dinner of smoked trout and fiddleheads. Which means all of this is finally starting to seem worth it. Sometimes. There’s still the whole “hold it or go in the woods” issue, to be discussed in further detail later, if you have the guts for it.

And lastly, when we experienced our first gardening season at the Hollow, two years ago, I was yapping to townspeople about my newly-installed asparagus bed, where to put it, how to build it. I was told, with some regularity, that I’d never yield anything, that it was a waste of effort. To they I would like to say: stuff it. These beautiful fat purple spears are plying their own course to our side of the ground, and doing so with zest and abundance.