Giving up the garden

If you're waiting with bated breath for part two of my "It's not that easy being green" series, bear with me. It's been busy-ness as usual for me, so I haven't had time to delve into the saga of the wall-hung boiler (which may itself turn into a multi-part series).

Instead, I'll post a quick update about the garden.

As I've written before, the garden seemed like a great idea, but in practice, it's been so-so at best (the photo to the right was actually taken on a good day). Having one of the less than a dozen garden plots (for 34 units), we've considered giving ours up for a while. But every spring we pledge that this will be "the year" for our garden.

A couple weeks ago, we finally gave it up. But it had nothing to do with the work involved.

This year, a fellow gardener had the thought that because our garden plots are situated on industrial-filled land, a soil test might be in order. The results showed the sporadic presence of heavy metals, including lead (we're still waiting on exact lead numbers).

My wife and I have always tried to eat organic (or at least locally grown) produce, especially since our daughter was born almost two years ago. So needless to say, those preliminary soil results led (no pun intended) us to give up.

Not having a garden should mean more family time and - of course - finishing home projects. I only wish we'd gotten the soil test results before I dug two-plus feet down in our plot so we could line it to keep the grass out.