by M. R. Lawrence

Created on: August 23, 2009   Last Updated: October 23, 2009

It was great, my first garden, and ambitious at that, done in the late spring early morning sun.

And it was all mine. At least the work was.

A neighborhood girl I met nearby invited me to her backyard on Hartford's Hudson Street. I think she was visiting a relative in the 2-3 family house and don't remember seeing her again after that day. We played for a while there and somehow started picking a few plants. She had to go inside, and well, I had been invited, so I stayed and picked up where we both left off.

I created my little farm from scratch, grabbing nearby flowers and snapping off small branches, pulling up what caught my eye and my fancy, and then replanting it all in a small five-foot by ten-foot plot or so in an unsuspecting neighbor's back yard. It sure seemed like a big garden and creating it made it feel like a big accomplishment.

Perspectives are quite different when you start out as a 4 year-old urban farmer. But it wasn't potatoes or tomatoes as such, but I would have grabbed them too for an excellent garden variety add-in, had they been nearby.

I had these colorful assortments of daffodils, little purple flowers, some petunias I think, and even 3 or 4 prickly red roses. And nestled in with these, in 3 or 4 parallel rows, you better believe, were fauna of various sorts, small leafy branches pulled from little trees and clusters of broken off bushes of mountain laurel.

Re-planting these was helped with the use of a tablespoon left in my care by the little girl, and I used it to scrap and dig little holes big enough to stick in my floral collections, and then fill back in with enough loose dirt to hold them upright after packing. This took a lot of concentration to make my plants stand straight up and stay that way on their own. This was work, but, hey, I was enjoying myself. They would eventually grow on their own and I wouldn't have to keep re-packing dirt. Right? But that was a nice smell when digging up the earth. Different!

As with every construction site, there were the onlookers, some of whom would actually get in the way at times distracting me for a spell. I enjoyed an occasional yellow butterfly fluttering about, but the dragonfly buzzes would make me jump; I left the ants alone this time as I was too busy, like them, digging little holes, and a worm or two which I dug up wasn't enough for the scuttling robins which kept their distance. But a daddy longlegs coming through would stop and make me the onlooker.

My mother had a fit

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