The beautiful bounty!

I've never grown a thing besides a beard, grass and weeds, and, frankly, I had very little to do with any of those.

My thumb is decidedly not green. More like black — that's the color of death, right?

I am the man who kills bamboo. I mean, how hard is it to kill bamboo?

So it was with much trepidation that I embarked on the journey of starting a garden. Fortunately, my girlfriend's thumbs — hell, her entire arms — are green.

So, we enrolled in our community garden, took a beginner's gardening class for some tips and checked out approximately 374 gardening books from the library (though, I must admit, I had glanced through any of them).

With much wildly anxious fretting and frantic interrogations of our gardening friends (shout out to Kelly!) and community garden neighbors (thanks to Ken!), we have, at last, grown something edible.

And we were thrilled. My girlfriend almost cried.

I don't think either of us were prepared for the joy of growing your own food.

So last night we dined on fresh zucchini and squash and basil pasta (with the herb from our garden). Tonight, we're planning on eating some banana peppers and kale in some sort of concoction we haven't figured out yet.

They say the food you grow yourself tastes the best and after last night's meal I'd agree. But why is that? Is it really the soil, the growing method you use?

All we really did was water and weed the plants and occasionally talk to them, willing them to just grow dernnit!

Which might just be the answer I'm looking for: The sweet taste of success from actually doing something yourself, with your own hands, with results you can smell and taste and savor.

Hmmm ... who's ready for dinner?