Week 2-ish: and then the Cold Snap

Week 2ish

It was in the kitchen that I received a disbelieving look from my Chicago transplant of a husband when I brought home a newly purchased a seed starter, some seeds of cucumber, tomato, basil, and cilantro along with a few dahlia roots, ‘for color’…this little experiment wasn’t something he expects to go well, and given the look I don’t believe he expects that my roughly $25.00 investment is worth the money or the work, time will tell I suppose…

I must say though by Week 3, after watching the dried up little disks of peat moss ‘grow’ and after I planted the seeds a couple of weeks ago, my husbands faith in my gardening abilities has grown, especially after listening to me squeal like a child when I saw little leaves sprouting in the seed tray taking up valuable counter space in out kitchen.

After that, I let them grow a bit more and then commandeered two coffee mugs and an egg carton and filled up my kitchen window with sprouting plants…this was a good and bad thing, good because the plants had more room to grow, light air etc…but bad, because I still hadn’t gained any counter space and my coffee-loving husband had lost “two good mugs”.

The Beginning

An onion and a clove of garlic in my refrigerator sat forgotten for a few weeks this winter and started sprouting, normally might cut off the sprouts and use as normal or just throw in the trash. But this time like times before, I felt moved to do more. Maybe it was the incredibly hard and brutal winter that left me starved for life, or my curious young daughter that pushed me to grow something or possibly the incredibly high cost of a decent tomato or pepper at the grocery store.

I’d been bled dry and frozen by winter and was ready for softness, growth and warm dirt; now let me tell you one thing about me, I abhor dirt, the dirty and the unclean, [this is why I moved from an fascination in archeology as a child to architecture] but the garden has a different kind of dirt; it’s a ‘clean’ dirty, it heals and sustains life, cleans the air and gives energy to those who work it.

So I gave in…I placed those sprouting cloves in a mug of water on my kitchen windowsill and let them grow.

What is so different about a kitchen windowsill in comparison to other windows? Why is it that in kitchens things are given a chance to become something more than they are? I think that it’s because kitchens are where even the normal create greatness, and the humble becomes more. Yes, the kitchen is a magical place…