It’s amazing every year. I line up the pots, fill them with dirt, stick dead, dried-up little seeds in them, and in two weeks give or take a little, I have live, green, growing things. I suppose it’s kind of cliched to talk about seedlings like this every spring, but the eight year old inside me is still wowed by it every. single. time. I look at the different seed shapes and imagine the plants that will grow, and I think to myself that we have one really cool God.
We’ve hit that part of the year when leasers sit down with their leases and think, “Do we really want to stay here another year? Are we paying too much in rent? Is moving again worth the hassle?” But that’s not a terribly pleasant process to go through every year, so this year, we decided to do something different.
We bought a house!! I can hardly believe that it’s happing, but we’re closing on April 1 on a beautiful little townhouse in a great part of town. Here are a few pictures. It’s in great shape. The last two owners have been artists, one a teacher and one a student, and there’s not a single white wall in the place. Everything is painted some warm and lovely color. And it’s been very well maintained.
There are three bedrooms, one downstairs with its own full bath and two upstairs with an adjoining full bath between them. We’re seriously considering making the downstairs bedroom our guest room and turning the upstairs into our own master suite. There’s not much that needs to be done to the inside. A little bit of touch up painting, but nothing more than about half a day’s work. We need to put a bit of molding along the kitchen wall where the red paint meets the cream paint.
There’s plenty of gardening space too! Lots of room out front, and the house is an end unit, so I have a three foot deep bed that goes around the side of the house and the back patio. There’s another two foot deep bed on the inside of the patio wall as well. One of the very first things I want to do is get rid of that wall and put up trellises instead. In addition to my regular summer veggies (tomatoes [6 different kinds this year!], peppers, beans, broccoli, cucumbers, and an assortment of herbs), I’m planning to put in strawberry plants along the side beds, and I’m hoping to turn the front beds into a bird and butterfly garden. Then once I’ve had a full year to see how the sunlight falls during the different seasons, I’ll come up with a more elaborate plan.
I haven’t been able to stop telling God “thank you” for this house. The way He brought us to it and worked out all the details has been absolutely amazing. We never imagined that we’d be able to afford anything in this neighborhood, but here we are, signed, sealed, and committed. It’s another one of those times where He has done more than we ever thought to ask Him for, and I can’t stop praising Him for it.
I realized it when I stopped by the garden store to grab some clippers and get some advice on salvaging the bulbs that I got last year but didn’t know when to plant. (If that sounds strange to you, here in the South, planting bulbs isn’t so easy. It freezes in December, then goes back up to the 70s in February and then freezes again in March, so bulbs are more like annuals than perennials.)
So while I was at the garden store, I expeditiously picked up a a big ole bag of potting soil and a package of strawberry seeds to go in the beds at our new house. (A post on that will follow soon, as soon as I can get some pictures.) And I stopped at Lowe’s and grabbed some trays that they were going to throw away to use for my seed starting trays. And I stopped at the grocery store to grab food for dinner and two packages of styrofoam cups (far superior to peat pots–no mold!) and a package of plastic coated freezer paper to line my trays with to catch the water. And now I’m home and looking at all of my seeds trying to decide what to plant first.
If I get them planted tomorrow, I should see the first flower seedlings in about two weeks and the first of the veggies shortly thereafter. The strawberries will take longer, probably four weeks.
I can’t wait. 
