Spring time, mid-May: right time for spring gardening in Colorado.

I was raised on a small farm and afterward, in a city environment (various cities, several countries around the world), I have always persisted on gardening, with a mixed success. Gardening in Colorado is a real test of my gardening willpower: after countless failures in this semi-arid climate, the main benefit could be that I became more tolerant to my own insufficiencies.

Farmers are good people. Gardeners are amateur farmers and they’re good people, too.

There are millions of people who take pleasure from growing flowers or vegetables in their small gardens in the summer or keeping pots of them going inside their homes in the winter. They nurture life and offer hope for the world. There are some decent people.

Planting and encouraging a garden takes virtues most of us don’t have.

Andy Rooney: Gardeners are Good People, in Common Nonsense, PublicAffairs, New York, 2002.

Last year, for the first time I succeeded in growing sweet peppers in Colorado. So, this spring I planted the same two varieties again.

Farmer’s mind set is not just an occupational frame of thinking, it is an inmost philosophy.