Hello, and thank you for stopping. I'm Billie McCreary. I keep the books at a farm-implement dealer here in St. Cloud, and my husband Jimmie is retired from the railroad. We bought our one-story house in 1976, and the first thing I did that spring was dig up the back corner of the lot. It's thirty feet by forty, edged with old landscape timbers, and 1999 was my twenty-fourth garden in it.

Every year somebody at work asks what the garden looks like, and every year I say "oh, you know, it's a garden." So this year I did something about it. Once a month, on a Saturday, I took one picture. Same camera, same backyard, and the camera prints the date in the corner, which settles any arguments. I skipped February and April because there was nothing to see but snow and then mud, and you've already seen snow.

We bought our first computer in April, and it came with a flatbed scanner, so in September I sat down with the envelope of prints and a cup of coffee and scanned them myself. Click on any month to see it bigger. Each picture has its own page with a Next button, so you can walk through the whole year in order, January to the pumpkins.

A few words about the pictures. They're ordinary drugstore prints from an ordinary 35mm camera, and I'm an ordinary photographer, so there's a thumb in one of them. I made them small so the page doesn't take all night on a modem. Jimmie took the ones I'm in, except planting day, when our son Jon happened to stop by and got handed the camera.

The Ledger is the bookkeeper in me. Every variety, when it went in, when we picked the first one, and how it did. I've kept it in a spiral notebook since 1976. This is the first year it's been typed.

No frost yet as I write this. Any night now.