“Write down the first words that comes to mind when we say . . .

. . . home.

. . . soil.

. . . rain.

Use those words in the title of your post.”

This is easy. The word is gardening. We cleared out a plot of land between the end of the walkway next to our garage and the beginning of the established garden to create a vegetable garden. We’re in our third year of working on this little plot of land and we’ve made some improvements. One of the most notable is the chickenwire fence we put up to keep the wildlife from raiding our garden. Last year all our plants were safe, but we had too many and so none of them worked well. This coming year we’ll likely do half of what we did last time and maybe we’ll be more successful. Of course, all this is predicated on the notion that the climate will work with us. It used to be that you could be sure that there wouldn’t be any frosts by Memorial Day but these days with the wild variability in the weather I don’t know if that old standby will be as reliable as it once was. Last year a surprise freak frost/freeze devastated Michigan farmers. I can only hope this year we don’t have a reprise of that again.