How does your garden grow?

I try to sleep in a bit this morning but can hear Rhonda, around 6AM, cackling like a banshee. I stay deep under the covers for a moment before I realize that she could very well be laying an egg so I run out there, into the quiet cascade of yawning blue morning light, to check on the ladies. They look stir crazy so I put the sprinkler on in the garden and open the ark so they can have a good range about the yard without eating the last of my radish patch.

I am tempted to get back into bed but the hoop of dawn and the promises of morning are so wide and thick that I cannot help but grab my camera instead and take you on a garden tour.

Things are growing here.

The early summer rains seem to be finished; the flowers, vines and vegetables are bolting for the sky. It’s a small space that I tend, compared to the ranch I hope to have one day, but it’s impressive when it peaks.

We planted twelve new roses in the rose garden this year after removing some diseased plants from the patch. They’re coming on now in hues that please the chromaphile in me. White, yellow, neon salmon, hot pink, blue…

I tuck into a new book. Well it’s sort of a book. Kind of. It’s perfect for mornings like these when the whole wide world is a distraction and I can only take a page at a time.

I pull weeds. I take my coffee so slow that it goes cold in the cup and simmers softly like a spinning bowl of silk under the sun.

Winona and Judith clean up the raspberry patch, near the back gate, near that secret and magical door RW installed in this section of fence. The compost is on the other side and I see that darn weenie dog from down the street is in there eating my future dirt. Darn him. Darn that fat little dog with an appetite for moldy avocado skins and mango pits.

The ladies see him too. I command them to go peck him on his bottom until he runs away, but they ignore me; they ignore the queen of the chickens and go back to their bugs and weeds. Good work ladies! Get all the earwigs please!

I check on the grapes, all 6 or 7 of them — the concords and the whites. They reach for me as I stroll by and I carefully tuck their arms and legs back into the fence. It’s like there are too many kids in the bed and the jumble of limbs look like spaghetti in a colander. The wind will blow them free again this afternoon and tomorrow morning I’ll tuck them back into place. I love those grapes. The fruit is young and tiny now, the clusters look like dainty deposits of minute, curled and sleeping babies.

I love tending my gardens.

I really do.

Especially this early in the morning when my feet are bathed by the dew in the grass and the neighborhood is still quiet and sleepy.