Gardening

I've been spending a lot of my (admittedly limited these days) free time working in my garden.

I love the whole planning part, I love going out and buying plants, I love planting them. (I don't so much love all the dead-heading, and I especially don't love weeding when it's 95* out).

I spent a shocking amount of money at the garden center today (now, granted, part of that was that I needed a new hose, as I apparently forgot to drain the old one completely before some of the heavy freezes this winter. Or maybe when my neighbor's dog got loose he used it as a chew toy. I don't know). I also bought something called Sluggo, which is the best thing I've found to kill snails and slugs. (It's an iron-phosphate compound; I don't know if they eat it or if it dehydrates them when they crawl over it or what, but it gets rid of them). Sluggo is expensive but it's not as disgusting (to me at least) as setting out little saucers of beer in the garden. (And it feels silly to me to buy a six-pack - even a cheap six-pack - just to poison slugs. {it's that alcohol-migraine trigger thing; I don't drink because of it so beer holds no attraction for me})

I also bought a bunch of special "heat resistant" cultivars (we shall see) of tomatoes and put them out. And some basil. And some lavender to replace that which drowned last summer during our period of high rainfall.

And four dozen bedding plants. Next time I propose planting four dozen zinnias and gomphrenas in a day, I'd like someone to dope-slap me. My arms hurt now and I ALMOST couldn't get up off my knees after doing it. And I expect my hands will go numb sometime tonight while I sleep (I have incipient carpel tunnel syndrome which you think I'd try to prevent by NOT DOING THINGS like digging 48+ little holes in the ground with a trowel...but NOOOOOO.)

I have a long, narrow flowerbed in the front of my house and it looks best with some kind of bright bedding plant in it. I haven't figured out a perennial that would consistently look good there so I just use annuals every year. Some years when I've been really energetic I rip out the zinnias when fall comes (when they're nearly dead anyway) and put pansies in for the cooler months but haven't done that lately).

So I now have 16 tomato plants - which I know, sounds like too many for a single person but the yields here tend to be low (All those folks who advocate some kind of modern version of a "victory garden" to allow people to eat locally - well, they must be folks that live in a perfect climate and have either the time or the "people" to do all the necessary work because I've found working full time and having a garden means the garden often gets neglected). I might get 20 or so good tomatoes over the course of the season. (And heck, if by some miracle the plants are super-productive this year I can always find people I want to spread a little goodwill to in the form of fresh tomatoes.)

I also have beans.

Tomatoes and beans are about the extent of my attempt to feed myself from my own land. If I had more time - and it didn't get so miserably hot and dry here most summers - I'd also try corn but I know a number of people who did it for one year and then gave up on it. (Maybe this year I will try a fall crop of cabbages; it seems that I always miss when the starts are in the stores - it's like August or something which just seems weird to me and I'm not thinking about cabbage at that time.)

Potatoes would be fun but you need lots of space for those, and good sandy soil. (When I was a kid, my parents were good friends with a family that had a HUGE garden. They used to invite us out in the spring to plant potatoes with them, and back again in late summer to help harvest, and then the two families split the harvest. I remember the harvesting times as really fun - the dad of the family had a little tractor with a flatbed trailer and we kids used to get to sit on it and he'd slowly drive up between the rows of potatoes and we'd lean off the trailer and grab all the potatoes we could see and put them in bushel baskets. Then, after the harvest we'd have a big cookout, which was fun, too.)

I tried watermelon one year but any of the melon or squash crops are risky - we tend to get the borers here that will attack the plants and you will go from a perfectly healthy plant setting fruit in the morning, to a totally wilted and dead plant in the afternoon, because some bug got into its xylem.

If I had more time, and more energy, and felt like paying someone to rip up more of my lawn for me (been there, done that, would rather pay someone next time), I'd put in raspberry canes and strawberry plants. I see lots of the strawberry plants for sale - I guess they do well here though I'd think it would be a little hot.

And I've toyed with the idea of converting the old clothesline setup to a grape arbor of sorts. (I don't dry my clothes and sheets outdoors - even though there's no "covenant" against it here, like there is in my parents' subdivision - because I suspect that would cause great misery for my allergies. I cannot think of sleeping on sheets that have basically bathed in pollen for a day).

(Then again - maybe I'd best keep the lines as lines against the day when we're all legislated to have to air-dry our clothes as an energy and pollution saving measure).

A lot of this daydreaming is just that - dreams. I have other things I really need to do first - like get rid of the brushpiles in back (I cannot bring myself to sent the limbs I cut to the landfill, but they're rapidly taking over my backyard) and get rid of the ivy (including some poison ivy) that are invading in back of where the brushpiles are.

But I love the idea of a perfect, neat, productive garden - maybe with a fountain plashing in the back (The birds would like that, too). I love the idea of being able to raise some of my own food - not for any kind of "stickin' it to the Man" sense, or not any kind of smug, "I don't need tomatoes that have traveled on a truck" sense, but in more of a sense of wonder, a "wow, I was able to produce this through my own labor" sense.

I think there's something very "centering" (to use a much overused word that I tend to roll my eyes at) about gardening. I always feel better mentally and emotionally (if not necessarily physically, and that will pass in a day or so) after doing it. I think it's because it's so immediate - you can see what you are doing when you pull weeds or cultivate the soil or put in plants. And there is the enjoyment of being able to see the results of your labor. (I will often go and peek at my garden out of one of my back windows just to look at it, just to see how it looks from the house. Or I'll make up excuses to go out back different times of the day just to see how it looks in different lights or to see how it's doing.)

I needed to do that this weekend. (There was a volunteer project I COULD have participated in, but decided not to - I figure if anyone asks I'll simply say, "There were other things I really needed to do Saturday." Which is the truth.)

I find as I get a bit older I need more downtime - more time where I can let my brain rest and get away from the work I do daily. (Perhaps that's partly why they have tenure and full professorships - many people can't drive at the same hard mental pace at 45 that they could at 28). I have begun to notice when I begin to feel a bit frayed and worn during the week, when I'm less patient, when certain personality tendencies of my colleagues are like an electric wire touched to an open nerve rather than something I can just shrug off. And I've gotten better at saying to myself, "You just need some time off."

And I've begun TAKING it when it needs to be taken. Instead of pushing myself to do more, or beating myself up for not spending Saturday in at the office writing another grant/article/proposal/who-knows-what. I'm coming to the conclusion that staving off the little beginnings of burnout now are better than dealing with the whole big mass of it if it comes later (kind of like how small prescribed controlled burns prevent a giant conflagration, if you're talking about a forest somewhere).

So I took my Saturday and worked in my garden. And it was good.