I decided to make raised beds to grow my veggies and fruits. That seems to be the best option based on my research. But that just added another project and more stuff to learn about... and more money to spend. Ultimately I ended up deciding to focus on the landscaping project during the spring/summer of 2013. I figured that the soil safety was the most important. Plus, once I saw what the new yard was like, I could better plan the beds. Of course that meant a whole 'nother year of being patient... and it nearly killed me.

But I used that year well. I did research on raised beds, reread my gardening books, took a wood working class, watched videos on making raised beds on YouTube, learned about garden covers, irrigation, rain barrels, compost and measured my new front yard about 30 times.

Then when the spring of 2014 was on the horizon... we had our second child due on April 10th. It didn't seem possible to build a garden from scratch with a newborn at home. I certainly didn't have the time or energy to start seeds inside in April. To be honest, I was already a bit overwhelmed with all that I wanted to do but had no experience doing. Add in a baby, and it seemed impossible. I was super bummed out to have to wait a whole year more.

And, that is when I realized that I was at that moment of having planned as much as I could and that I was defeating myself. Would it be easier with a one year old at home? Probably not. I couldn't plan anymore.  I just needed to start doing and figure out what I didn't know. Everything that didn't work would only be a learning experience.

Turns out, I planned it close to perfectly. I built seven raised beds from scratch. (I was only going to do five, but I still had a driveway full of gravel and soil so I had to buy more wood and build more. I planted 22 different fruits, veggies, and herbs, (more if you count the different varieties of tomatoes,) all from seed the week before memorial day. As of today, I have my first veggies. I'll be harvesting snow peas, chard, beets, and sunburst squash by next week.

Almost everything is growing. I've made some mistakes and will do some things differently next year. But even the mistakes were amazing learning experiences. All because I planned my little heart out... and knew when to act. Check out these pictures of my garden taken this morning.

Here's what I did instead. I set to work figuring out what I needed to do to fix the soil, did research on when to plant in New England for the following year, and started a self-designed "sun study."

The sun study was the easiest, so I'll start with that. I am up early with my son on Saturdays anyway, so I set an alarm to go outside once an hour and took pictures around the house to see where I was getting sun. I did this two or three times about a month apart until I got a sense of where and when the sun was shining. 

The what and when to plant was a little tougher. The books I read suggested that I started most of what I wanted to plant inside weeks before I could bring them out. That seemed like a lot of pressure to then get everything in the ground at the right time, to harden them off appropriately, etc. I made a decision that the book probably represented the absolutely perfect way to grow stuff. I was willing to compromise and see what happened. 

I feel like this is a really important side point. As ADHDers who try to plan, we can very often get overwhelmed by try to plan to perfection. And as many of us know, perfectionism leads to inaction. Yes, we have to plan to get what we want, but there is always an element of uncertainty too. We have to do the best we can to be prepared and accept that we can only rarely be perfectly prepared. Sometimes that is the only way to learn what we need to know.

Anyway, I decided not to make a decision about whether to plant inside or not just yet. I knew I had to deal with the soil first. So, my research indicated that to really fix the soil, I needed to spend about $30K to totally replace all of it. That was not going to happen. I broke the process into two objectives. I needed to make the yard safe for my son. And I had to figure out how to make a garden where I could grow lovely golden beets.

I'll pick it up here in Part III. Here's a picture of our death trap of a garage and the least charming corner of an altogether charmless yard from when we moved in.

But, as ADHDers we often have big ideas that either don't get launched or turn into serious boondoggles without the proper planning. I like to think I'm a pretty together cat at this point in my life. So I set to my garden dreams by planning, planning, and planning some more. I got two books on gardening, one specific to the North East. (We live just outside Boston in Milton.) The other was about vertical gardening which maximizes the yield per square foot of garden space.

I read most of these books pretty thoroughly and realized that just plopping a garden down when we moved in would be a classic "rush into the doing stage" ADHD mistake. I learned three things that June. One, I needed to check my soil to see if it was right for what I wanted to grow. Two, I needed to understand where I could get full sun (at least 6 hours a day during the growing season.) And, three, it was too late to plant in June anyway. Maybe that last fact was a blessing? It forced me to delay my gratification until the next year at the earliest, and that gave me plenty of time to plan anyway.

So, step one was a soil sample. I followed the instructions on the UMass Agriculture site and sent it off. It only took about a week to get the horrible news. Our soil was fine in terms of PH to grow most of what I wanted. Unfortunately, it had so much lead in it that I couldn't grow root crops, and shouldn't even let my son play in the yard. (As a side note, this is not an uncommon problem in the North East with houses like mine that our pretty old. Years of scraping and repainting before lead paint was outlawed has left much of your soil contaminated. Our sample only cost $10. I would suggest knowing your lead level if you have children.)

Again, this forced me to be patient. I also didn't know anything about how our property interacted with the sun throughout the year. Reason number three to be patient. The best garden in the world won't grow without sun. 

Here's a picture of my overgrown "front yard" I took during my sun study. I'll pick up the story of how it came to not be a hot mess in Part II.