Just Sunday

It’s just Sunday, and it’s promising to be a hot one. Time for a leisurely breakfast and some coffee. We have plants to go in in the morning. We scaled down our vegetable garden to tomatoes because of the lack of sun in our yard, but we have a full herb garden that needs a couple more herbs. Lots of basil to go in with the tomatoes.

Once the tomatoes are in, we may be waiting for rain. I would like a good thunderstorm to come through. We might go and write for a while; I don’t know. Not an exciting day, but a good one.

Have a good day!

Spring Break

I’ve been officially on Spring Break since Friday, so I don’t have to work this week. I have plans to spend the week doing absolutely nothing but editing a book and watering my seedlings. Maybe napping, since I feel like Daylight Savings Time has screwed up my sleep cycle. A bit of dreaming about Spring.

It doesn’t feel like Spring Break. I feel like I could go to work today and college would be in session and I would have office hours today. If I went into work today, I would find myself the only one, facing a locked building. So it’s really Spring Break.

I don’t do nothing well. I hope I can occupy myself with things to get through my Spring Break.

My Seedlings

I might have mentioned before that I have a grow room in my basement to coax seeds into seedlings for the garden. I planted some early seeds on the second of February, and most of them have shown at least a little growth. I have cardoon (a relative of artichoke, except you eat the leaf stalks), mountain mint, yarrow, hyssop, lovage, lavender, and rosemary in a 72-cell seedling tray.

The lavender and rosemary are going very slowly, but both have at least one seedling up. The cardoon might need to be transplanted sooner rather than later because it’s big. I didn’t think the cardoon would come up so soon because I’ve had such bad luck with it before, but no, it popped up like the alarm clock had just gone off.

Growing seedlings helps me through a cold winter. Whether it’s the thrill of growing green things, the brightness of a room full of fluorescent grow bulbs, or the reminder that Spring will eventually arrive, it’s one of the best things for the winter blahs I’ve done.

One thing that worries me, though, is that I’m not writing. I’m burned out on writing, and have a lot of doubt about how good my writing is. But at least I have a hobby to sustain me.

Planting Seeds

I’m planting seeds for a spring herb garden today. Just a few for now; it’s early times yet for seed starting. I received some herb seeds (lots of herb seeds) from my sister for Christmas. I’m converting one particular raised bed in my neglected garden into an herb garden.

I have a grow room in my basement. The shelves were already existent; we set fluorescent lights over each of the shelves and put some heat mats in. There’s a reflective surface on the opposite wall so that the light doesn’t lose itself in a corner. It’s a near-ideal setup for starting seeds, although it could use a little cleaning up.

The challenge is going to be keeping the garden weeded. I don’t have the stamina for weeding, so it falls to my husband, who doesn’t really recognize weeds from herbs. I will mark the herbs well, so that he can find them. Wish me luck.

Sunday Afternoon

This morning started with a discovery

Apparently, according to some reading about ADHD I stumbled across, people with ADHD have trouble with non-verbal working memory (referred to in one article as visuospatial working memory). I probably have ADHD given my family history. In addition, I struggle with visual and spatial stuff. I can’t remember what someone looks like very well. Maybe after 50 times. This includes my husband — I didn’t know for a couple of years if I could recognize him in a crowd. I let him walk toward me before I approached him.

Apparently, people with non-verbal memory problems have trouble visualizing, including visualizing what a successful result looks like. Does this relate to my writing crisis, where I’m not sure if I’m doing “well enough”?

Planting thyme

I segued from analyzing my mind to planting herbs. We have a hill of rip-rap, upon which the past residents laid a bare layer of dirt on top of. I planted herbs there; the mint loved the bottom of the hill but the top killed off whatever was planted there. So my husband and I laid soil at the top and planted herbs. I love to cook, and I like fresh herbs.

I’m a little tired now, but closer to the completion of the planting season. Looking forward to lovage in my soup and mint in my namya (Thai noodle dish).

Music in the evening

Listening to a new singer-songwriter playlist as I type this. It’s a good day. All I have to do is sort out the writing thing and try to figure out how to visualize success to motivate myself. Any ideas?

My Longest Hobby

I have spent my life developing “project obsessions” where I completely immerse in a hobby and then, inexplicably, give it up. I hit a moderate level of proficiency, and then I get stuck, and then I give up. I did this with embroidery, beadwork, gardening (I couldn’t keep up with the weeds and my gardens didn’t look beautiful. I hit the wall.

Writing has been an exception. I have been writing for — six? seven? years, and I don’t seem to be ready to stop. I learn, and I improve, and I don’t seem to hit the wall. I’m not sure why; possibly because it doesn’t take hand-eye coordination (which I’m severely lacking) or lots of money (which I don’t have). Writing for me is at the optimal level of challenge with opportunity to improve.

With writing goals. it’s best to set internal goals. I’ve made the mistake of setting the goal of getting traditionally published which is an external goal I have little control over, especially in the overloaded publishing market. If I set internal goals, I’m much more motivated. Not that I’ve given up being traditionally published; I’ve just decided that I have to set it as a secondary goal.

I guess writing is with me as a part of my life.

Rain, I love you — now go away.

I love rain — except for today. Today I don’t like it so much.

I have so much left to do in my garden. Richard needs to rototill beds for the Three Sisters experiment (Jerusalem artichoke, squash, bean) and the moon garden (the exotic and toxic corner of my edible landscaping). I have to plant several raised beds with Chinese vegetables, weedy greens, nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, NOT deadly nightshade), and root veggies.

I can do most of the planting tomorrow afternoon if I need to, except for those new beds. If we can’t get to those today, we might be another week in the works.

Yes, I know it’s stupid to expect the weather to cooperate. But, like most humans, I do.

I guess it’s time for Plan B. Writing.

Day 47 Reflection: Rejoice

I don’t feel too much like rejoicing today. I overindulged in Easter candy. I didn’t sleep well last night and now I feel hung over.

But it’s a beautiful day, the perfect day for Easter. I will go outside today and set up some of my raised beds, for Spring is here and I do not need to wait any more.

I will eat breakfast, and go out, and clean my yard, and look at growing things. I will remember the lines from a poem by ee cummings:

I who was dead am alive again today,
and today is the sun’s birthday

— ee cummings, “I thank you God”

It is part of the human condition to rejoice.

Drunk on Possibilities

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of plants surviving the winter and popping up in my garden. I swoon at the possibility of seeds I plant growing up into lush leaves and succulent roots and fruits. I dream of my garden as I nurture it with manure and pull the weeds to prepare for the season.

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of getting my novel published. I send it to publishers and agents I haven’t sent it to before, envisioning the book’s acknowledgement page, and hoping beyond my experience of rejections. The thought of being published makes me tipsy.

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of finding my muse again, the inebriation of ludus, the joy of enjoying the energy of growth. My drunkenness makes me giggle, which makes people look at me sometimes.

In the words of Baudelaire, one should always be drunk.

While My Garden Sleeps

While my garden sleeps, I make big plans for it. Each year I learn more about how to make it bigger and more interesting. I have always had what one calls a “green thumb”, although I’ve also had my share of mistakes.

When I was seven years old, my mom’s cousin Dale Hollenbeck brought me all the spindly, sickly plants on his shelves to try to bring back to life. By some mystery, it turned out that I could actually keep them alive. I may not have brought them back to vigor, but I could at least give them a fighting chance at a couple more years.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, as was evidenced by the time I planted a kidney bean in a peanut butter jar in the pure clay soil of our backyard. By some miracle, the bean came up — well, the stem came up, but the bean itself with its seed leaves remained in the clay. I was left with a botanical mystery — the headless chicken of the plant world, which persisted in its barely animate form.

Perhaps the most important childhood moment for me as a gardener was the discussion I had at age 14 with my neighbor and almost-grandfather, Johnny Belletini. Johnny taught me a small but extremely important lesson — all plants had names, even weeds, and even the weeds could be useful. Most importantly, he taught me about dandelion wine. This led to a very enthusiastic me running back to my house with a dandelion wine recipe in hand and forbidding my parents from mowing the lawn until I picked all the dandelion flowers for wine. (Note: there is nothing forbidding a fourteen-year-old from making dandelion wine in US statute. They just can’t drink it.) My parents and I spent four good years making wine as a result, until I left for college. But I digress.

I didn’t get back into growing plants (or winemaking, for that matter) until after I got my Ph.D., mostly because I had neither the time nor the place to garden. I dabbled in landscaping my wee rental house in Oneonta NY with shade plants because that’s all I had to work with. When I moved to Maryville and bought a house, however, my dreams of gardening blossomed (ahem) again. My taste in gardening developed.

At my first house, I had no basement, no sunny windowsills — and a taste for cottage flowers that would frame my cute little acquisition. I couldn’t find the plants I wanted at the local greenhouse. My father and I built me the world’s smallest greenhouse out of four wooden-framed storm windows, and I started seeds there every year for a while., running a cord out the back door to the chicken house heater that kept it warm. If the electricity went out, an entire crop could be ruined, and that happened at least once.

I live in a bigger house now with my husband, and this house has a full basement. In the room that used to be the coal room, the previous owner fitted it with shelves. We fitted it with shop fluorescents and grow bulbs, and I now have a grow room big enough to handle 12 seed flats.

The gardening theme at this house: Everything I plant needs to have something edible about it except for the moon garden, whose plants tend to be white-flowered, strongly scented, and toxic. Right now, I have the seed flats waiting for seeds at the right planting time. I have some seeds cold-stratifying in the basement refrigerator with some roots that I will plant in the spring. I have a piece of ginger which I hope will sprout so I can plant it for a bigger yield later this year.

As always, I have big plans for the garden as it slumbers in its February torpor.