The State of the Yard

It's another year. It seems a little odd to me that it's been a year since I updated here, but then again, school and LJ swallowed me. This is life.

I'm updating here, rather than on LJ, for a few reasons, none of them enough on their own but together they just seem to make it a good idea. I want to keep this stuff together, not just filterable by tag. I think a lot of the people on my Friends list are somewhat bored by all the plant-geek nattering, as non-gardeners often are. And I have this site, and the best way to keep it in my mind is to have something I like to update, so that I actually get around to updating the rest. That's the theory, anyway.

I have high hopes for the year. It seems like I always do, in January. It's been an extremely mild winter, and I have to wonder how that's going to affect the summer, but I'm still hoping for the best and planning like mad. My light rack works properly, for the first time. I have radical new plans for watering the garden. I'm setting aside time, daily, to work on yard projects, and several hours weekly for the garden itself. I've tried to plan for weekly fertilizing, and probably weekly miticide spraying, hoping that at least one of the commercial miticides will keep the Pacific mite under control. I'm going to put down nematodes again. I don't know when I'm going to have time and energy to dig in amendments -- I'd love to now, but the ground is sopping -- but I have plans for essentially replacing the soil with various things to see what works best.

This semester is going to get wilder, but so long as I don't panic, I think I can keep myself from burning out and set aside time for gardening. The two go together, of course; gardening is one of my best stress management strategies, so long as things are going well. And the key to that is knowledge and planning. I know what I'm fighting, and I have potential solutions lined up.

The story so far: I have many little pepper plants under lights, with a couple of Red Robin seeds emerging. Red Robin grows no taller than one foot, and gets loaded with tasty cherry tomatoes. I couldn't resist starting a tomato early, but at least this one can live under the lights for a good long time.

Most of the garden is under newspaper and leaves. I haven't gotten the urge to go out and cover the last bit, so I may end up weeding it -- but it's no more than another 10 feet down, nowhere near the impossible task I had last year. It's just the corn beds, so half of the four can be done a little later, as time allows. The rest has been cleaned up, other than having a couple weeds here and there and a few piles of rock; I'm almost done disassembling the raised bed, and it'll need to be reassembled and filled. An afternoon's work, there, not bad.

I need to move some posts, and buy and assemble the watering system; then it's down to digging holes and filling them with amendments. I'll try to get the watering system out of the way next weekend, before homework really heats up. I'm crossing my fingers that this setup will scale up less frequently, and when it does it'll be easier to clean out. The drip emitters really were a disaster.

I've narrowed down the tomato list to something I can reasonably grow, and now I'm holding on with tooth and nail not to add more. My goal is to can tomatoes this year, so I'm sticking to really productive, robust plants with meaty fruit. I have a couple of new ones to satisfy my curiosity, a cherry tomato because I realized I can't really do without (not Red Robin, I'm putting in one Dr. Carolyn), and hopefully a seed increase on Yellow Wisconsin 55. We'll see how many germinate.

I've been spending a lot of time and energy in the last week clearing out the weed trees in the front thicket. May I just say, for the record, that this is immensely satisfying? They've been encroaching on the lawn for years, and finally I get to go in there with axe, mattock, and saw to hack them out of the ground and reclaim up to fifteen feet of that border. We've made tremendous progress, Nick and Alex and I, and now we can actually see the street. It'll look very different after the chainsaw hits the big trees, and after I clear out all the stumps. I have plans for a couple of roses, herbs, and flowers in that area, so that when we look outside we can see something colorful and pleasant, rather than just an advancing green wall.

My arms and hands are stiff and sore today, though. Too much mattock-work, and too much gripping of the bow saw. I might go out there and pick at it a little, but I really should rest up and turn to something less physically demanding.

It's about time I made an effort to manage my time so that gardening is on the list of essential priorities, up there with homework. It's a big part of who I am, and while it has stresses of its own, it's also something I can concentrate on which isn't school, something mostly within my control. The point at which it gets depressing is when I don't have enough time or energy to combat the problems; again, planning and setting aside time are the keys there, along with not over-committing myself. (I've scaled back the area to 3/4 what it was.)

And the rewards are like nothing else. Grades and scores always feel empty to me -- not like looking out front and seeing a landscape that flowers like I want it to, or bringing in baskets of vegetables that taste nothing like what you get in the store. Or having seven-foot towers of corn and tomatoes, laden with ears and fruit. I always prefer something I can touch, and taste, to numbers on my transcript. School is a means to an end, but gardening is an end in itself.