To get us through the hot summer, we’ve joined a swim club, a pool, that is co-operatively run. Sure, there are paid lifeguards and a single full-time employee who manages the lifeguards, and takes great care of the pool and its massive lawns, wooded picnic groves, tennis courts, playground and more. But other than a handful of paid employees, what makes this swim club great and different from all others, is that volunteers put in a tremendous amount of energy to make the club so enjoyable. There are crafts and nature walks and swim lessons and clay projects and organized volleyball games, all manner of community organized entertainments for all ages. I’m not just repeating the marketing materials when I say, “It’s so much more than a pool.”

This year, I’ve rented a 10 foot square plot in the newly rototilled organic community garden on the grounds of our swim club. I stayed up last night til 2 am scouring the internet for organic gardening tips and to figure out what I’ll do with a 10′ X 10′ garden.

I’ve never really planned a garden before, much less an organic garden. I have a little land alongside my house and I’ve put in some pretty perennials and have been working on improving the soil by adding my own home made compost. It’s not at all the same, though, to maintain a garden someone else created or add a few things to it here and there, as I’ve been doing– it’s not the same as getting a big sunny square of fairly clay-heavy soil and starting your first very own veggie patch.

One of the fascinating aspects to organic gardening is that planting diverse plants in groups can be beneficial, if you plant the right combinations of plants together. Plants are referred to as companion plants when they tend to do well growing in proximity to one another. This is a pattern that keen observers have noted about natural plant life, and it’s a fascinating observation. In the garden, it’s apparently well known that certain flowers and herbs will repel insects while also helping along particular veggies. Thus, my late night scribblings have awfully cute phrases like tomatoes love basil and beans love eggplant, and in my short hand, there are hearts drawn for love.

Today I plan to get digging in my compost heap and see if there’s any more black gold lurking there, which I’ll then shlep to my new garden patch. I have a plan, and I hope it’s a good one. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but isn’t there also supposed to be such a thing as beginner’s luck? I’ll also be taking before and after pictures as I go, tracking my progress and hopefully I’ll get around to uploading some pictures here.