Garden Dreams

I Have been having garden dreams for weeks now. Since we moved to Denver I have had a plot in one of the urban gardens (except last year). But living in a city that's a desert in drought years it's been always a little difficult to feel completely good about have it. Water gets tight in Denver and I feel bad about watering as often as I have too.

Now that we are moving I am having dreams about temperate climate gardens. Especially tomatoes. When I was a kid we had a garden at our cabin it was really quite big for "weekenders" but it was really for three families not just ours.

The most important part of the garden was the three or four rows of tomatoes. Not only were they great to snack on on hot days but at the end of the summer just before the first frost we would have a giant picking party where we would pick all of them and separate them into bags by color. There would be almost twenty bags.

I would ride back to the city that night dozing against a years worth of brown paper bags filled with tomatoes. The smell of dirt, unripe tomatoes and brown paper still represents the coming of autumn to me. The next week would be filled with friends, who didn't have houses out of the city, stopping by to pick up the bags that lined the front hall of the apartment.

Now that we are moving back to New England (18 weeks!) dreams of communal tomatoes fill my head. But I've expanded my parent's shared bags to a weekend of canning stewed tomatoes and salsa making with old friends to last us through the winter.

Of course the garden with be filled with other plants, as we hope to produce most of our own vegtables, but it is the tomatoes that I dream.