Covid Gardening

I’ve been practicing - learning to change the things I can, and to accept the things I can’t. I’m also reminding myself that other people get to choose how they spend their days. I get to choose how I spend mine. We all need to practice personal responsibility of course and work in teams, especially a marriage, but there’s plenty of margin around the edges to choose.

Why that particular thought belongs with covid gardening, I’m not sure. I’ve always had a garden, but in a pandemic it’s stylish again. Oh, so that’s why I ought to learn how to grow my own food! It's one of the silver linings to our current situation. Apparently covid gardens can go by other names more like the victory gardens of WWI and II - hope gardens, good news gardens. I like the term solace garden.

Planting and tending a vegetable garden, then harvesting and preparing food for the table is as real as real gets. I’m lucky that Mark appreciates my home-grown produce. He tells me he can eat all the swiss chard I can grow. He also loves beet greens with little beets attached to the end. We eat it all, right down to the roots. Bitter on top, then almost sweet at the end. Summer itself.

I like to include flowers with the vegies as well. This season it’s a row of sunflowers. They were doing wonderfully until yesterday when one stout, glorious fellow just fell over. When I investigated, I found insects had bored through the stem right at ground level. Now my perfect row has a hole in the middle of it. Mark said what he always says, “things are seldom ideal.”

Speaking of less than ideal circumstances, I took a drink from Mark’s water jug he had left in the front seat of the pickup. I felt something slide in my mouth and swallowed it; thought I was imagining things and took another swig only to have more slip down my throat. When I tipped the jug back an earwig was crawling by the mouthpiece. Yuck. The neighbor lady overheard me calling Mark to complain and suggested I call a nurse because the earwigs might burrow into my intestines. Not likely. I’m still alive and feeling fine. So - lesson learned. A word comes to mind when speaking of earwigs – interminable – and they are, so I’m sure many people have ingested them in their drinking water by mistake and lived to tell about it. When I went to bed last night I envisioned them crawling up my throat in my prone position.

Other July adventures included camping with my extended family. We reserved a large campground and arrived with a variety of tents (pup and family), campers (rented, old, new, deluxe), and a repurposed school bus (take away the s and h and it reads cool bus). We do like most families I suppose. Young adults bike and hike and tend kids, little kids explore and play in the dirt. Oldsters, of which I’m a member, prepare food and sit around the campfire telling stories. I broke ranks by going on a mountain bike ride with Seth, but I do love the campfire conversations. My niece said that’s why she goes camping with the family – for the stories. Bless her.

Like I said, I'm practicing - practicing gratitude most of all. And though the swallows are staging a good fight to use the porch for nesting, bugs are crawling and chewing, the heat has slowed grass regrowth to a crawl and the weeds are calling my name, I still walk around in awe of the headiness of mid-summer. We all know it won't last. I have a Buddhist saying near my keyboard, the trouble is you think you have time. July is like that. 

my solace garden

its been a great year for wild primrose 

Thinnings for supper

I counted a dozen ladybugs feasting on ragweed aphid

climbing cucumber tendrils,
 so delicate yet so strong

Callie enjoying Rich's cowboy coffee

this cow pasture is pollinator paradise

Classifying July 2020

We have a pair of cedar waxwings nesting in the quakie outside our office window. They were building the nest one day while we watched. The male, we assume, held on to his beakfull of cotton from the cottonwood trees while the female got hers safely secured in the nest. Then they put beaks together as he transferred his bundle to her for proper placement. We’ve always loved waxwings - so velvety, so creamy - and to have them nest right under our nose is a treat. 

After a cold spell it’s turned off hot again for Independence Day. It’s been wet, and all around us plant life is exploding. We live in the middle of chaos. There’s a willow-lined canal on one end, a cottonwood forest on the other, brushy dry sandhills, irrigated pastures, and lots of weeds and grasses. In simplified terms, with a variety and abundance of plant life (flora which get their energy from the sun) comes a variety and abundance of animals (fauna which breathe and forage for nutrition). In the middle of manicured farms, cattle fill the big animal niche and birds and insects thrive. On our end table is a grass book, a bird book, one on wildflowers, and a well-worn one on weeds.

Cotton is floating on the air again today. I’m pretty tired of it getting in my nose. As we walk around the ranch, putting up and taking down temporary fence, changing water and moving yearlings, different fragrances waft in and out of our awareness. The perfume from the tiny yellow blooms of the Russian Olive trees is especially pungent right now. The mountains have their own plethora of scents. When Mark got home from the range last night he said it smelled like an Avon commercial.   

We’ve been grazing the yearlings around the house. It’s one of my favorite times of the year - two weeks of watching them forage for nutrition from wherever I am around the house, the porch, the deck, or the kitchen with my morning coffee. They’re tromping around the perimeter of my vegetable garden right now, kept out by a single strand of electrified string - nerve wracking!

When the cattle change paddocks they eat the forbs first, those weedy/wildflower-like plants. They also like tree leaves, and of course grass, of which we have a multitude of varieties, quack, orchard, brome, timothy, etc. Fred Provenza, author of Nourishment, What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom, talks about the value of diversity in our diet and in the diet of grazing animals. Animals are hard wired to pick and choose a diet that is healthiest for them. We have the same ability, but it has mostly been lost in our hyper processed/over analyzed food culture.

We celebrated the 4^th by sitting on the deck and watching the full moon rise above the cattle at work. Out of the blue Mark asked me, "what pleases you about your life right now?" I enjoyed exploring that one, and then asked him the same question. His response: "times like these."  

Sometimes I get comments from readers about our way of life. They're very nice and complementary, as if what we do is something to cherish - and I suppose it is. But, truly, it is just life – with all its beauty and all its imperfections. The pandemic has brought this fact front and center - if one has enough to eat, health, and a home with a dose of freedom and security, we’re all in the same boat. I can be as unhappy (or happy) as anyone. 

Mark reminded me about Willie's song, Good Times. The last verse goes like this:

Here I sit with a drink and a memory,
But I'm not cold, I'm not wet, and I'm not hungry,
So, classify these as good times.
Good times.

a string protects my butterfly garden

. . . . and my vegetables

build it (let it grow) and they will come