Clean Slate Garden

The potter has her lump of clay. The sculptor has his chunk of marble.

The artist has his clean canvas. The writer has her blank sheet of paper.

And the gardener?

The gardener has her cleared plot of land.

I had a landscaping crew clear out the vegetable garden today.

The rotted boards around the raised beds? Gone.

The bent and broken tomato stakes? Gone.

The piles of refuse on top of the compost bins? Gone.

I am literally and figuratively back to "square one" in my raised bed vegetable garden.

Later this week, I plan to lay out new garden beds, keeping in mind the "keyhole concept", which I read about  in Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway. This was the book the garden designer left on my bench out front on one of her visits to my garden last spring.

I had hoped to rearrange the raised beds last fall, but the drought left the ground dry and hard and almost unworkable. Since then we've had snow and rain, and now it is spring and the garden is indeed all new again, a clean slate... literally.