Before this year 2009 - 2013

 Like I said before somewhere here, I started growing a vegetable garden of my choice in 2009. I grew up here with the same vegetable garden that my father created & grew since 1954,  when he could no longer physically do it in 2008.

I moved back East in 2004. Other than times in garden as a child which are just hazy memories or times as an adult that we had heated discussions on where to grow the Italian flat leaf parsley, mostly I was a failure as an indoor plant grower. And the only planting seeds & tending a vegetable garden was my year round arrugala in hanging planters off my back porch in LA. And picking the radicchio lettuce my father planted for me with seeds he brought with him when my parents visited me.

So when I asked him if I could take over his garden & grow what he wanted & what I wanted too, he sadly said: "OK".

So I hit the ground running!! I read online anything I could, got books from library, and parcipated in a year long workshop one Saturday a month, for 1 year for the whole planting season, at this marvelous free 2 hour workshop, that I attended at a local nursery/garden center called TERRAIN, in Glen Mills, PA. Then I started taking courses at Neumann University towards a certificate in Horticulture. And I had the BEST teacher: my father and his huge 700 sq ft vegetable garden ( that I begged him to make into a pool as a child !!) 

Trial & error. A test garden almost. So LUCKY. And SO MUCH FUN!

He was always telling me I was "doing it wrong", "that won't work", "they're  going to DIE that close!!", "why ya planting that!?!? takes too long to grow & takes up space while it grows!"  I felt like he might be cursing my garden & I better get some protection from Saints, Spirits of grandparents, the color red to ward off evil spirits, light candles, etc etc. ANYTHING to prevent a bad thing happening to my garden. As a superstitious Italian all this fretting, worry, anxiety was normal, but as an adult sane rational woman,  I understood why my father was saying in what he was; I totally understood: he COULDN'T do it anymore. And true to what I knew in my heart & believed, everyone was telling me what he was saying about ME & my Garden when I was not around: a beaming smiling proud Papa!!!

He's with me EVERY MINUTE I am in OUR GARDEN. The two of us!

Gx2 Garden.