The Potager Garden

Potager Garden (google search photo source)

In 2004, I spent five glorious days in Paris and loved every second of it. I find any excuse possible to extol the French and now I have another reason, the potager garden.  I just finished taking a six week landscape design class though our local adult education program.  One of my goals this year and into the future is to install edible landscaping in our front and back yards.  However, I needed to know a bit more (by which I mean a LOT more) about landscape design principles before I haphazardly start replacing our existing and perfectly lovely landscaping. I certainly want to make things look better (not worse).  I really didn't know what to expect from the the course, but I came away with a great appreciation for the art of landscape design, a bit more knowledge of cohesive design principles (including my new favorite term, focal point), and most importantly with a concept design for our front yard.  Assuming things go according to plan, our front lawn will be replaced by a French potager-type garden and the area along our driveway will become a small fruit "orchard" consisting of two to three fruit trees.  I don't see the potager portion of the design happening until next year. Particularly since I still have the office and living room projects to complete, a garage to clean out, and a house to paint over the summer.  But, the orchard is something that we can start working on now.  The hard part will be narrowing down our choices of fruit trees down to two or three!!

Ohm Yeah!

A while back I posted about prioritizing "me time" and my list of projects that I would like accomplish this year. Not to check them off a mental list, but because I want to enjoy doing them and they make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.  Well, tomorrow I start my first in a long series of yoga instructor training classes that will take me the next seven months to complete.  This is something I've always wanted to do.  If you had asked me a year ago if I would dare to put becoming a yoga instructor on my To Do List for 2011, I would have laughed, rolled my eyes, and given you the old "Ya Right".  But here I am. Dream big and you just never know what may happen.  In my case a variety of stars aligned to get me here, but had I not had a "Life List of Things I'd Love to Do" with Yoga Instructor near the top, then I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be writing this post tonight.   I'm not sure that all this will ever lead to actually teaching yoga.  But if you don't try you never know, right?

I signed up for this first course in February and at the time it seemed soooo far away.  Now it's here and I feel like a giddy child on Christmas Eve waiting for Christmas to hurry up and arrive.  Don't get me wrong, while I can't wait to get my yoga on, it is going to be a loooong 10 days.  I'll be working half days in the morning, attending 5 hours of yoga in the afternoon, then heading home to spend time with my gracious husband (and one of the stars helping to make this happen) and amazing son, then falling into bed to do it all over again the next day. Despite all the craziness I'm still super excited!