As luck would have it, good friends of mine own an apartment overlooking my community garden.

From early spring through fall, the aerial view of my plot and the community garden as a whole goes from earthen brown to verdant green to a colorful jumble of flowers and ripening crops. It’s also a good way to spy on my gardening neighbors. I can take in the whole scene at once, secretly assess who’s growing what, and plan my crop bartering strategy.

What the view also affords me is an opportunity to examine my plot from above, as one would draw it on paper. My early-spring sketches of brick pathways, squiggles of squash vines, orderly rows of marigolds and greens spring to life five stories below me. It’s so much easier to see what can be moved where, and gauge what’s going right and what may go horribly wrong. I’ve been known to gaze out from my neighbor friend’s window, do some mental reworkings in my head, and rush right down into the garden to set about making the changes. Mind you, this usually happens when there’s some sort of cocktail party or sports-related television viewing going on with a roomful of guests (“Why’s Ellen camped out at the window? Oh, she’s just doing some gardening.”)

New Years Gardening

My most recent window gardening experience occurred on New Year’s Day. While friends had gathered to watch football and ease their hangovers a bit, I found myself staring down at the community garden below.

Several inches of snow had recently fallen. My garden plot was truly a blank sheet of white paper. Thinking back to last summer’s challenges with my tomato crop, the awkwardness of the paths, the disappointing placement of the leafy greens and green beans, I rethought and rearranged this summer’s garden onto the barren rectangle below.

The semi-circle brick path became a straight dissection of the plot. Strawberries, I love you but you don’t have a big enough harvest to justify your space, so I’m hacking you back. Orderly rows of early-spring greens then summer’s harvest and finally fall crops will wash like waves across the plot. The rhubarb? I’ll work around those. I nearly broke my back removing the other two specimens.

Community Garden Plans

So there I am, hatching these plans for my summer crops on New Year’s Day. I pull back my view from my community garden plot to take in the whole garden, and I see footsteps in the snow. Then I follow them from the gate, around the gazebo and then in the direction of the building. I have to stand on tippy toes and really wrench my neck to the side to see where they end. At a not-insubstantial and very well made glass and aluminum cold frame. It appears one of my fellow gardeners wasn’t sitting idle, just imagining their summer harvest.