4746133386_3bef8db2ceDSCF1821” style=”border:0px solid;margin:0px;”/>

My garden. It is a little, well, wild. There’s crabgrass between the rows, which I am slowly but surely rooting out. This makes it resemble a teenage boy in need of a haircut putting up a determined fight at the suggestion that a trim might be needed. My garden does not look like those pristine pictures you see in garden magazine layouts.

But I love it. And despite the crabgrass and the marauding deer, it’s producing tasty greens and radishes and strawberries, and the flowers say that soon we’ll have squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, corn, eggplant. The sunflowers might recover from being eaten by hooved hoodlums, too.

I love it despite the imperfections because it has reminded me of something important; that a garden doesn’t have to look like something out of a magazine to be effective.