Here's a reason to love sunny, warm spring days at the farmette: you don't have to tax your brain as you move through them. Turn on automatic pilot and you're off! Step outside and follow your green thumb. Look one way, then the other, get out the hand shovel and start working.
It's productive, it's rewarding, and there's plenty of trivial stuff to think about: worms, cheepers digging up roots, weeds, always the weeds, soil quality, plant spacing, trimming last year's growth -- all of it. It requires no great imagination. The creative part (the planning, the listing, the purchasing) happened, for the most part, at the kitchen table during cold winter months. Now, you just have to do the work.
Some have said that all these remote meetings with fellow workers aren't conducive to stimulating creative thought. But is it really that, or is it that the pandemic is messing with our creativity? Facts, swirling masses of facts, analyses, filling our heads... How are we supposed to invent something new and beautiful when our brains are spinning with this other stuff?
But in the garden, I can create without having to keep my mind nimble. It's like cooking -- you do the physical work of a project long spelled out for you. You follow practiced steps. You know that the result will be okay. Perhaps great if you're lucky, and if the plan was a good one.
And so for this and many reasons, I am thrilled to wake up once more to a stellar day!
Yesterday was gorgeous, today is grand, tomorrow and Sunday are to be stupendous.The days will be, by definition, full and satisfying. How good is that!
Morning breakfast, on the porch. Okay, so it's in the mid 50sF -- about 12C. That's a tad cool. But the promise of warmth down the road is enough to get us outside.
And then I get to work.
Interrupted only by a lovely FaceTime call with little Primrose in Chicago. (Sorry about the glare, but the day is bright and we are outside.)
I do think she was hoping to find her cousins here, but she got only me. And flowers. And a blue sky.
The little girl is easy to please: she seemed content to let it go at that!
(Ed and I take the tomato seedlings outside today: we're hardening them!)
(Is it "tulips and Peach," or "Peach and tulips?")
(Dance, by our robust crop of rhubarb...)
In the afternoon, Snowdrop does come here to have a little private time at the farmhouse with Gogs. At first, she runs, almost on auto pilot, up the path to the farmhouse door.
But she reconsiders. Water play beckons!
Could we lift up the lid of the sandbox? We can!
On the one hand, it's not really a five year old thing. Sand tea parties, sand structures, sand this sand that. But something about it grabs her. Perhaps it's that we've all been inside so long, or maybe it brings back memories of days when playing in this wee box was like the bees knees!
She takes off her shoes and digs her toes into the cold sand and grins as if it were a beach on the Caribbean and the sand was abundant and warm...
In the evening, I bake a frittata. I have got to make a dent in the heaping mound of fresh spinach and the three bags of mushrooms from our local farmers. There's no better way to do this than to create our weekly egg extravaganza!
It is the first day of May. It's heady, it's flowery, it's sometimes fickle but mostly fabulous. You gotta work harder to find the "fabulous" this year, but on days like this one, you feel that it's within reach.
Stay well and stay connected! And when someone delivers something to you, tell them (from afar) you really really appreciate their work. Even if it seems weird to be so effusive. Do it anyway. It'll be a nice story for them to bring home at the end of the day: Hey, guess what happened to me in the course of my deliveries! This over the top person started dancing and singing and holding up messages of love...
It's productive, it's rewarding, and there's plenty of trivial stuff to think about: worms, cheepers digging up roots, weeds, always the weeds, soil quality, plant spacing, trimming last year's growth -- all of it. It requires no great imagination. The creative part (the planning, the listing, the purchasing) happened, for the most part, at the kitchen table during cold winter months. Now, you just have to do the work.
Some have said that all these remote meetings with fellow workers aren't conducive to stimulating creative thought. But is it really that, or is it that the pandemic is messing with our creativity? Facts, swirling masses of facts, analyses, filling our heads... How are we supposed to invent something new and beautiful when our brains are spinning with this other stuff?
But in the garden, I can create without having to keep my mind nimble. It's like cooking -- you do the physical work of a project long spelled out for you. You follow practiced steps. You know that the result will be okay. Perhaps great if you're lucky, and if the plan was a good one.
And so for this and many reasons, I am thrilled to wake up once more to a stellar day!
Yesterday was gorgeous, today is grand, tomorrow and Sunday are to be stupendous.The days will be, by definition, full and satisfying. How good is that!
Morning breakfast, on the porch. Okay, so it's in the mid 50sF -- about 12C. That's a tad cool. But the promise of warmth down the road is enough to get us outside.
And then I get to work.
Interrupted only by a lovely FaceTime call with little Primrose in Chicago. (Sorry about the glare, but the day is bright and we are outside.)
I do think she was hoping to find her cousins here, but she got only me. And flowers. And a blue sky.
The little girl is easy to please: she seemed content to let it go at that!
(Ed and I take the tomato seedlings outside today: we're hardening them!)
(Is it "tulips and Peach," or "Peach and tulips?")
(Dance, by our robust crop of rhubarb...)
In the afternoon, Snowdrop does come here to have a little private time at the farmhouse with Gogs. At first, she runs, almost on auto pilot, up the path to the farmhouse door.
But she reconsiders. Water play beckons!
Could we lift up the lid of the sandbox? We can!
On the one hand, it's not really a five year old thing. Sand tea parties, sand structures, sand this sand that. But something about it grabs her. Perhaps it's that we've all been inside so long, or maybe it brings back memories of days when playing in this wee box was like the bees knees!
She takes off her shoes and digs her toes into the cold sand and grins as if it were a beach on the Caribbean and the sand was abundant and warm...
In the evening, I bake a frittata. I have got to make a dent in the heaping mound of fresh spinach and the three bags of mushrooms from our local farmers. There's no better way to do this than to create our weekly egg extravaganza!
It is the first day of May. It's heady, it's flowery, it's sometimes fickle but mostly fabulous. You gotta work harder to find the "fabulous" this year, but on days like this one, you feel that it's within reach.
Stay well and stay connected! And when someone delivers something to you, tell them (from afar) you really really appreciate their work. Even if it seems weird to be so effusive. Do it anyway. It'll be a nice story for them to bring home at the end of the day: Hey, guess what happened to me in the course of my deliveries! This over the top person started dancing and singing and holding up messages of love...
