We hadn’t yet got the garden arranged or planted, but we had done some work on it. I had buried the compost we had been dumping on all winter and removed the last of the old kale stalks, so it was more or less ready to go. So, since the weather has finally taken a turn for the better, Sara decided to go get some seeds in the ground.

She called me at work. “Did you rearrange all the bricks from the garden path?” she asked. “Uh, no? Why would I do that?”  I said. “Well I don’t know, but someone took apart our path and rebuilt it in a new pattern.”

It seemed a little too polite for vandalism, so right away we assumed perhaps someone new to the garden had gotten confused and thought they had been assigned our plot. We emailed the garden director, but there was really no way to know who had made the mistake or which plot they had really been assigned.

Anyway, we hoped they hadn’t planted anything in our garden, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. Sara put the path back, flipped the dirt, and planted some seeds.

A few hours later, we got a text from one of our neighbors, and fellow gardener. “Someone is digging up your garden!” Sara immediately ran over there and confronted the lady, averting disaster.

Now, of course it was an honest mistake, but by the time Sara got there she had covered over some of the swiss chard seeds and she had unearthed bucket fulls of our hard-earned compost and was taking them out of the garden. All winter long we have been laboriously schlepping our good kitchen compost over to the garden, braving -30 degree weather to save our slimy decomposing fertilizer.

Apparently, one of our garden neighbors had disdainfully told her, “Oh yeah, they just used this as a dumping ground”. Hello? It’s called compost! What gardener can’t tell the difference between trash and biodegradable worm food? The thing is, our plot is by no means untended. We have a nice path and nice smooth dirt, and a box full of strawberries. Sara had put sticks in to mark the rows of planted seeds. “Oh, I thought maybe my friend had left me some sticks,” she said. “Good thing you got me before I threw out your strawberries!”

Good thing indeed!

Again, it was an honest mistake. I feel bad for the lady; I would be mortified if I had made the same mistake. I can only imagine she will spend the rest of the year hiding under the lettuce whenever she sees us. Maps are difficult to read. I’m just glad our neighbor has our back (and a quick texting finger)!