Back to the Prairie by Melissa Gilbert

Author:Melissa Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2022-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Life Begins the Day You Start a Garden

Where does hope come from?

Preachers, poets, and psychologists have tackled this question throughout human history. Pick your expert.

For me, it came from the view outside my window. It was the regenerative beauty of nature. It was spring, and it was gorgeous. And it was amazing to see. In the city, the warmth of the new season was greeted by throngs clad in T-shirts and flip-flops emerging from months in their apartments. In the country, it was marked by a symphony of life I had never before witnessed to this degree on a daily basis. Trees sprouted delicate little pastel-colored buds, white and pink and light blue. Butterflies and bees appeared. Hummingbirds showed up. Grass started to grow. At night, bats woke from their long sleep hungry for bugs.

Mother Nature announced the party was on.

And then, suddenly, BOOM, I woke up one morning, walked outside to greet the day—and the chickens—and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Timmy! You’ve got to see this!”

He joined me outside.

“What?” he asked.

“Look,” I said.

“At what?”

“Everything!”

I made a sweeping gesture across the yard that unspooled in front of us until it was met by a thick wall of trees. The forest floor was covered in ferns. There was grass everywhere. Flowers peeked up out of the ground all over the place. Over the next few days I spotted baby rabbits tentatively exploring their new world. Same with baby deer. They were everywhere, as if a bus had come by and dropped off a group. There were skunks, groundhogs, squirrels, porcupines, and raccoons. I felt like asking where everyone had been and how they had slept.

“It looks like we’re not the only ones ready for spring,” said Tim, taking off his work gloves after spreading bluegrass seed.

Recovered from the chicken coop, we were ready to tackle our next major project: planting a garden. We really were going through the motions of old-fashioned homesteaders. We found a place to live, fixed it up, waited out the winter, got our egg-laying chickens in order, and now we had to think about creating a garden where we could grow the food we would need to sustain ourselves. This turned out to be a much bigger project than the chicken coop. We had to determine where we wanted the garden; how to build it in order to protect it from all the critters who would see our efforts as a new Chick-fil-A in their neighborhood; what kind of soil we had; whether we had to build raised beds; how to rig up an irrigation system; and eventually what to plant.

But first things first. When Tim surfaced from his deep dive into the soil, he announced that we were going to have to build raised beds. There was so much rock beneath us—something we had discovered digging posts for the coop—that we would need a skip loader to overturn gigantic boulders and rip up underground rock if we wanted to plant a substantial enough garden. I was surprised.

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