Gardening season and genealogy

Gardening season and genealogy always seem somewhat incompatible but this year I am going to try to combine them. I have lost a lot of time to genealogy in this past year most due to my back injury. That, being much improved, is no longer sidelining me but gardening does take a lot of time at the beginning.

However, we have all the flower beds prepared for annuals and all the biannuals etc pruned and neatly ensconsed in a new bed of fresh black earth. My husband follows the principle of working this into the existing earth so is more work but has amazing results.

The main vegetable garden now needs to be tended to and the digging has begun. I actually love digging the main garden. It is comforting seeing the rich earth turn over with each shovelful and breaking it with the point of the shovel then neatly hand tilling it back into a smooth liberated pile of clay/black earth ready to receive the seeds of this years crop.

The lawn now fertilized and already looking like it might need a trim is the first welcoming sign of spring very often with its bright greeness flowing away from your eyes as you look around this piece of land that we have been cultivating now for nearly fourty years. Our ambitions were much larger in our youth as we had a quarter acre of land. We are happy though with our smaller plot purchased when we moved here to Ottawa fourty years ago. We can gradually shrink the large vegetable garden and we have done so. Now we can just plant the rows further apart and that decreases the amount of work and the yield of crops.

And so it begins once again, the yearly planting, the tilling, the pruning and then the gathering.

Sometimes I think that is like genealogy. First I took those 42 courses at the National Institute of Genealogy and whilst taking the courses I started to work through the records looking for my people. Then I eliminated the ones that were not mine and entered them into Legacy. I have been a Legacy software user from the beginning of my genealogy days in 2003. I have watched it come along from a good basic genealogy software to the excellent product it is today. I have more than a dozen trees on Legacy - many of them are Blake trees which are larger than my own family tree.

Hopefully wills transcriptions and family trees to come in abundance this summer!