... A Field Well Tilled.

I think the worst of our farm-building chores has been the vegetable garden. Perhaps the other Ploughman would answer differently.

The south-east corner of our farmyard was not my favorite. It sloped awkwardly and a large, old Walnut tree leaned precariously over it. The privet leaned over our new fence, dripping, it seemed, ticks. We have Housworth family pictures that show the area more open, sloping gently up to the old carriage barn. Evidently, Ed Housworth had several large bales of cotton that were stored in the barn for decades, he being too stubborn to sell it at the market price. The children would play on them and, I like to think, might have used them as stages for plays or as imagined Western boulders hiding little Indians from little cowboys.

After many plans, we settled on a terraced vegetable gardens with raised beds and stacked stone walls. Easier planning than realizing, as always. With help, soil was pushed and sculpted and removed. The low stone walls were installed. And we were left with a mess of slick mud in the middle of the wettest summers in history. The dogs were dyed the red of Georgia clay. Our beautiful wood floors were a matching hue.

A space can look quite level and be anything but level. Installing the beds and trying to keep them fairly even seemed impossible. We ended up using all of the rag-tag brick and stone left over from excavations and piles of forgotten foundations and pathways. It felt good to find a use for all of it and I feel certain that the Housworths would have done the same, though they may have been slightly less concerned with making anything level.

After several weekends spent on hands and knees, having consumed many bottles of pain relievers and reward-bottles of alcohol, we have our vegetable garden. There are a few nut trees to remove this fall or winter, shading the beds a bit too much for their needs. We'll get to that. The raised beds are full now of fluffy, good soil, awaiting their first cool-season vegetables.

We'll have room for our garlic, brought from Ossabaw Island off Georgia's coast. There is a bed for Asparagus roots, though not the delicious white German Asparagus that our friends, B & M crave. Strawberries will fill one bed. And there are already six Blueberries settling in. Fall vegetables will be arriving at work any day now. With a glass of wine in hand, I can already imagine them in neat rows, ready for cool nights and warm days.

Day by day, we are realizing our dreams for a gentlemen's farm. As with all of our projects so far, the trials and pains seem to dissolve when we stand back and look at what we've built together. Here, at last, is our 'field' well-tilled.