Plant a "tree".

Today Ivana was attempting to plant last year's broccoli bush! As the weather was so gorgeous she was asking me when we were going to start planting in our garden.

When Iwas growing up we had a garden. And it was a garden that our family of five really relied on for veggeis and fruits. We labored all spring turning over the dirt and planting, all summer watering, most of the fall harvesting and making preserves. The garden was not for leisure, it was a chore that we had to do. We had about a quarter of an acre which was on a rather steep slope. And watering in the summer wasn't with a garden hose, but with a bucket! There was a stream nearby that usually dried up by the end of the summer, but before it did, it caused me and my brother and sister a lot of trips up the hill with two full buckets of water. At the end of the summer we used to collect rain water into the barrels that my Dad had got from work. Harvesting was usually fun, as we got to eat fresh strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, red and black currents, tomatos, plumps and apples. That was the time to enjoy them, since those yummy things would no longer be available at home, but mostly left for making preserves only! We had spent hours and hours in nauseously hot kitchen helping Mom to cook homemade jam, pickle all sorts of veggies, make saurkraut, etc. If by the end of September we had plenty of preserves, a couple of sacks of potatoes from our garden, a sack of sugar, a sack of rice and flour, we were gonna have a good winter. Garden was a chore. And I hated it! I hated it, hated it, hated it! My arms were hurting after watering, my back was hurting after weeding, I was simply tired making all those jars. I loved winters!

And now one of my dreams is to have a garden!Not as a chore, but for leisure. Our landlady has let us use a tiny patch of land for gardening. So it's been a couple of years that we've been planting tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, zuccinies, and my two absolutely favorite herbs, basil and parsley.

So Ivana remembered us planting the garden last year and is looking forward to this season. And we have a hard to believe story to share!

Usually we'd buy ready plants at the end of May, but last spring I decided to have some fun with Ivana and start from seeds! We had collected enough empty egg cartons and other plastic containers to use for this purpose. It was a bit messy but a really fun to do project. We arranged our "babies" on the open porch on our second floor. Ivana would water them and check every day if they had sprouted. And then a couple of days later I noticed that someone was digging in the dirt. I kind of thought it was Ivana, somehow sneaked out without me noticing. Very unlikely, but whatever. Who else? I fixed the dirt, and again next time I noticed that someone was digging in the containers, dirt all over the porch and in some cases the seeds were missing. As I knew for sure this time that it could not be possibly our daughter, I started suspecting an animal. A cat? Sometimes we had a cat stop by and rip our garbage bag if I happened to leave it on the porch overnight. A squarrel? We have plenty of them in the park, but never seen any near our house. Some kind of bird? I would've heard the banning noise against the windows if it was trying to escape. It was a mystery! We were gone for the weekend and came back to a complete chaos! There was nowhere to step! Dirt all over the porch, ripped plastic containers, no sign of any seeds left, and what's more... plenty of funny smelling surprises in Mirek's working boots! It was one very smart animal having a lot of fun!

We were bewildered!We kind of had a suspecion of the animal capable of doing that sort of mess...But in the city? You've got to be kidding! Until one evening Mirek saw him coming up the stairs probably hoping to find some more seeds to dig and some other fun to have. It was a racoon of a huge size! Mirek had scared him away, emptied up the porch and brought a trap. We've never seen him again. Aren't they smart? I guess he went back into that sewer he'd come from.

So today Ivana was asking me if the racoon was going to come for a visit this year. I hope not!