This is the fifth summer that we've stayed in Richmond since moving back east, and therefore also the fifth soilday of our backyard garden. Our garden is not spectacular, but it is special; it is both calendar and time capsule, a lodestar around which we orient our daily lives and our memories of the years past.

This year, we came close to disaster.

Lucy was born in September, and she was approaching five months as the weekend which we had earmarked to plant our seeds approached. That week was a tough week — not for any interesting reasons, but for the uninteresting and hazy reasons common to all new parents — and the conversation Haley and I had went from "how shall we Tetris the seeds this year?" to "how many boxes should we do?" to "should we be doing this at all?"

After much deliberation we decided that a single four foot by four foot box (scaled back from last year's garden which was quadruple that size) felt appropriate and represented a commitment to our lovely hobby tempered but not extinguished by slightly more pressing concerns. A few months later, that decision proved to be one of the better decisions we've made: every morning, Lucy comes out to the garden with me and helps with the morning's work, picking overgrown mint and basil, inspecting the peppers, re-latticing the cucumbers, and weeding by proxy by occasionally anchoring herself to a nearby patch of crabgrass.

One of the things that anyone who has ever dabbled in gardening will tell you is that mint is a weed. Bizarrely, we have not shared this plight: we try to grow everything we can from seed for the fun of it, and for some reason, mint is the one thing on which we never manage to really get a consistent handle. We grabbed some clippings from my mother and, thinking it a wise idea to hedge our bets, grabbed another from our friend's parents in Fairfax while we were up there.

You can imagine that this was perhaps an overcorrection, and we were left with a copse of mint that bordered on calamity 1 ^[1]. We can only drink so many juleps and mojitos! We ventured to far-off lands (which is to say, to recipe blogs not yet registered in my Feedbin) for inspiration. We finally stumbled upon a winner almost obvious in retrospect: mint chimichurri. Garlic, red wine vinegar, oil, spices, food processor: call it a day. Goes perfectly with red meat and breakfast sandwiches; goes great with a lot of other things too.

I mentioned that the garden is a time capsule, and this is what I drive at: 2025 is the year of many things, but now too it is the year of mint chimichurri in much the same way that 2022 was the year of Oops! All Cucumbers and 2023 was the year of driving out to Louisa County to score a great deal on industrial-sized bags of vermiculite.