My garden journal has a big exclamation point under today’s date: We finally broke ground at the Intervale community garden plots today! A beautiful sunny day in the sixties, we couldn’t help but get ourselves out there for some digging and planting.

Here’s what our plots looked like before we did anything today. Obviously you can’t tell where ours start and end from this photo; it’s more for my own reference I suppose. The bed centered in the photo that is lined with wood and has yellow straw on top is our garlic bed that overwintered.

This is only my second year growing garlic, and I can tell you, the newness of this exciting endeavor hasn’t yet worn off. We planted garlic heads in the fall, covered them with soil and a thick blanket of mulch, and let them sit – all winter long – for nearly six months. It is a worrysome experience: Will they survive? Did I plant them too early? Too late? Did I use enough mulch to protect them from the winter elements? Did I use too much and risk smothering their tender shoots as they reach for the light come spring? These questions fill my mind all winter long, intensified by the fact that we don’t very live close to our community garden to be able to check on them regularly.

And then one spring day my questions are answered. The small green shoots reach out of the straw, stretching as they wake up from winter dormancy. They are alive and beautiful.

As if that weren’t enough, the garden offered other garlic gifts today as well. Garlic that had accidentally not been harvested last summer was growing in other parts of the garden, so we dug them up and planted the tiny heads of garlic today, which can likely be harvested as small garlic bulbs in the fall.

While at the garden for hours today we also turned lots of soil to get ready to plant our root crops. We’ve decided to use the Intervale plots (two adjacent garden plots) for potatoes, beets, carrots, onions and garlic. Oh, and we’ll give winter squash another shot, though we didn’t have much success last year. All of these are crops that don’t require much maintenance or regular harvesting, thus, we don’t mind growing them three miles from our house.

At our home gardens we’ll plant Mark’s beloved tomatoes and peppers, snow peas (already in the ground), and lots of salad greens, spinach, kale, chard and other yummy greens. If I had any energy left today I’d be out there right now planting more spinach seeds…

Believe it or not there’s actually still snow on the ground in places, but with this new green growth today it seems that spring has finally arrived.