Gardening: Sprouts and Neighbor's Gifts

Buying your first home as a twenty-something is equal parts exciting and terrifying. The looming decades of debt ahead of you (though not unlike the debts racked up from college). Debts aside, what if our neighbors are lunatics? Well we were lucky enough to fall in love with our old pile of bricks, and have awesome, generous neighbors too.

When we moved in they had brought over a big meat dish, and when we answered the door they asked if we ate meat. I told them that we were vegans, and so they took their huge casserole dish back with them. It was sort of an awkward moment, and I didn't want to be unappreciative, but I also didn't want to cross my moral ground and accept a dish that would just be fed to our dogs or wasted. So I was honest. We didn't hear back from them for months after that. That was, not until their garden harvest was ready...

Thinking that we offended them with our vegan-ness, we were surprised to see one of their grade-school sons at our door come spring time. He brought us a large bag full of veggies from their home, organic garden. Tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, potatoes, and they all tasted so amazing. Later they came back and brought us a watermelon!

They grew a WATERMELON. With all the gifts that their garden provided, I got extra excited to learn how to make my own veggies. I'm starting, and this is a learning process. Our composter is full of good material for our fall planting season, and in the mean time I turned my first batch of seeds (tomatoes and bell peppers) into sprouts! Its like magic. Hope these keep growing... wish me luck.