Ssh! That sound is our dinner growing.

There was no place for a garden in our small backyard without digging up the lawn, and I didn't want to do that. But there was an unused, dry fishpond, rather crude, that an earlier tenant had made by digging out a spot and hand-sculpting cement into place to form an oval pond. In the way of unsupported concrete, it had cracked widely in several places, making it incapable of holding water but suggesting to me a new use as a small, well-drained garden.

I imported soil and sheep manure from the ranch where I worked, mixed them thoroughly in my concrete-lined garden, watered, waited long enough to let the fertilizer mellow, and then planted seeds.

Since I was shoveling, hauling, and working the ground anyway, Laura asked me to prepare a flower bed in the front yard, and I also worked in fertilizer there. She wanted flowers through the spring and summer and to celebrate the birth of our first child in the fall.

I planted the flower garden near the front steps as I waited for seeds in the vegetable garden in the backyard to sprout.

The northern Sacramento Valley's hot, long summers are ideal for most crops. Before long, we harvested and ate a variety of vegetables from our garden.

I began to cook soups that took advantage of our crops and provided full meals for us. I cooked enough brown rice for Laura and me and, on occasion, guests. I boiled whatever vegetables were ready to harvest from our garden, snow or sugar snap peas, green beans, beets, kohlrabi, kale, collard greens, mustard greens (with careful attention to whether they were starting to get strong-flavored and therefore must be used sparingly), green onions, chives, yellow crookneck squash, zucchini, squash blossoms, tomatoes, and whole small carrots, or later, larger carrots that I cut up.

Timing was essential for the best- tasting soup. I put the vegetables that needed to cook longest into the boiling water first, and I put the quickest-cooking in last. While the vegetables simmered, I added tamari soy sauce, garlic, and sometimes, sparingly, nutritional yeast.

I didn't allow any of the vegetables to cook very long. I wanted them just short of fully cooked, so that they were still crisp and held their integrity as individual vegetables. The exception was tomatoes, which didn't hold together and spread their juices and seeds throughout the soup. It was as perfect as if I'd carefully planned it that way.

I didn't have room in our garden to grow corn, but generous friends had more corn coming from their gardens than they could eat , and I frequently sliced the kernels from the cobs with a sharp knife and added corn near the end of the cooking time.

I sprinkled grated cheese into the soup or put a generous layer onto each bowl. White cheddar cheese was my favorite, but any cheese we had available would do, and changing cheese brought variety to the soup, which varied further according to what vegetables I had harvested minutes before I added them to the pot. It was never the same twice.

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