This Spring, my wife and I planted flowers and vegetables in the Wellesley Brookside Community Garden (we're plot 13 at the corner of Oakland and Brookside)
Here's a glimpse of the garden as we approach the first day of summer.
Our 5 raised beds include tomatoes, peas, lettuce, eggplant and basil:
Cutting flowers and climbing vines for the hummingbirds:
Beans, squash, borage, spinach, and thyme
Onions, cucumbers, kale, parsley, and beets
A hand-built grape trellis, with morning glories, and runner beans.
I also built 2 bird houses (wren/bluebird, and nuthatch/chickadee) and 2 birdfeeders (hummingbird nectar and sunflower seed).
We're already harvesting more lettuce than we can eat.
As we weed, compost, and tend to the garden on nights and weekends, I leave my Blackberry in the car because unlike this recent article in the Boston Globe, a mental recharge is more about being disconnected than connected.
During quiet times of reflection, I'd rather focus on sunflowers than servers, eggplant than email, nasturtiums rather than networks, mushrooms rather than malware, and gardening rather than Gantt charts.
Society today is so stressed that community volunteer work is considered is distraction, the shortest measurable time is not the nanosecond but the time from the light changing green until the BMW behind you honks, and aggressiveness is confused with leadership.
My garden grows with the family's love and attention to the process of transforming a seed into a delectable shared meal, knowing that our labor created food for the soul as well as the body.