Space to grow

Expanding my garden, plus a box cube comic!

In addition to hunting for morels, gardening is another favorite thing that gets me out of my work chair and moving my body after a long midwest winter.

I was filling my sketchbook back in February and March with daydreams of time spent in my vegetable garden.

Sketchbook musings from March featuring lots of green beans and last year’s surprise broccoli success

It’s only my fifth year into this gardening endeavor. I love how much I learn every year by doing. I get ideas and tend to just go for them, because the stakes are low, but more often that not, will still yield yummy results – like last year’s experiment with an old packet of broccoli seeds.

Guess-timating how much space a full-grown plant will need is not my forte (despite it telling me on the packet)

The homegrown broccoli was delicious. But between those, the marigold seeds strewn about that I didn’t realize were XL-sized, sunflower seeds, and 3 rogue tomato plants that popped up in addition to the 6 that I planted, everyone was fighting for resources.

Every year my garden has been, in a word, crowded

I’d been vaguely thinking of expanding my garden square footage to give everything some more space, but hadn’t gotten much further than that by early May – which is just about prime garden time in my location.

Then we had an unexpected string of warm weather days that coincided with a slow work week while I was in-between projects. Something came over me and I just went into garden mode.

Progress photos of this year’s garden glow-up

I ended up doubling the size of my vegetable garden! I even DIY’d a trellis.

I’m not planting much more than I usually do – just giving everything the proper space it needs to grow.

Nature and gardening have an incredible ability to bring me back to the moment.

My particular brand of anxiety and mental illness often have me playing mental gymnastics just to get through the day. It can be overwhelming and exhausting.

But with my garden, I go out in the morning and say hello to my plants and I’m immediately filled with calm. In these late spring and early summer days after recently planting, growth is slow and quick at the same time. Getting to witnessing it is a gift I’ve come to cherish.

All that matters is what I see in front of me – a seedling, a bud, green or yellow leaves, is the soil still damp or do I need to water today? I check the perimeter for signs of rabbit intruders. Birdsong keeps me company. I can tell the difference now between the mourning doves, the robins, the grackles, the cardinal's song, warblers, the sparrows and finches – all from passive listening while tending to my garden.

If the pandemic hadn’t brought us here to Iowa, away from bustling cities, I wouldn’t have discovered this joy. I think about that often. If we hadn’t found this house that we rent, I don’t know when I would’ve learned of peonies, like the beautiful ones surrounding our mailbox, that bloom for only about two weeks each spring. The sight of them in full bloom leaves me speechless every single day of their short lives.

I didn’t know just how much I, myself, needed this space to grow.

Unexpected collaborations

Substack is also full of joys I hadn’t expected, but have come to cherish – like Robert Howard, or

O L O Bunny🐰aka Kevin

, writer of Paperbag Stories.

I don’t recall how or when we crossed paths here on Substack, but I’m so grateful we did.

An octogenarian living in the UK, Robert is creative, prolific, and always inspiring me with his ideas. He makes little booklets of the stories he writes, and leaves them at a local bakery/cafe for patrons to enjoy (an idea I love and might borrow).

He also makes paper box cubes.

You can imagine my delight when Robert wanted to have a go at making a box cube out of my Self Care/Bath Ritual comic!

He emailed me ready-made PDF files so that I could print out and start creating my own box cubes, and also went a step further and mailed me pre-cut examples so I could more easily see how it all works.

Below is a photo of my progress as I practiced cutting them out and putting them together on my dining room table. (Notice also the transit map box cube, included by the self-proclaimed “public transport nerd” 😀.)

Box cube assembly

I love that we collaborated on something in a way, despite the great space between us, from age and experiences to country and continent.

(We’ve actually “collaborated” once before – Robert was inspired to write a story based on a sketchbook drawing of mine!)

Proof, again, that space can be just what you need sometimes.