Community garden

I think I mentioned before that my friend Elizabeth Rose and I have a plot in the New Eden Collaborative gardens behind the First Parish Church.

I think I'm supposed to be keeping a journal of events surrounding the creation of these gardens ... well actually, they were there last year, too, but have been re-configured.

So I'm going to log it on here.

March 21: We met at the church for the initial prep meeting.

This involved a discussion over coffee and pastries and then going out to stake out the whole garden and the individual plots.

OK, well ... there were too many men with too many tape measures and too many impatient females.

While the men (and a couple of women) were running about with aforementioned tape measures and green metal stakes (these stakes will become very important later), the rest of us tried to figure out where our individual plots were, based on a site map.

Here's a tip: don't think you know where you're situated before the perimeter measuring is done.

One woman, who shall remain nameless, got so disgusted after she staked off and started to work what she thought was her plot only to discover she wasn't even close that she stalked off in anger, never to return.

Elizabeth and I, and the gardeners to the north and south of us, were equally impatient. We measured and staked and measured and staked and I think once again before it was all done.

Then, when it was all done, our plot was only a fraction of what it should have been.

Oh dear! It turned out the measurement from the back fence was off by 3 feet.

Luckily for us, these people know the meaning of the word "community" and we worked it all out with no residual hard feelings.

Elizabeth and I, tired and dirty, retired to Hana Japan for chirachi. We laughed a lot.