Wednesday - 362nd

You know the old saying -- just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I thought of that today. A lot. 

We were to have rain, and so after breakfast...

... I settled in to work on my garden plans. For the moment, I simply sketched out the various flower fields (there are now10, with six "subfields") and listed all the new flowers that I will be planting. Here's how it looks.

I know I know I know! That's so old fashioned! Who even writes in long hand anymore! Well, I did. The Clairefontaine notebook makes me think of Paris every time I open it up.

I took a break to pick up my new glasses. I can see clearly now! The world is not a hazy fuzzy place after all! I can see, for example, that it did not rain and that it's not likely to rain today. The ground is wet, but that is understandable -- it's from the melted snow.  

So maybe it's time to start prepping the new flower beds and cleaning out the old ones?

It's a huge job, but I'm thinking -- if I work just one to two hours each day and every day, I'll have it all ready for the arrival of the new plants at the end of April.

I go outside, put on my gardening gloves and start in on the bed by the farmhouse path. That would be bed number 4, as per sketched plan. Ed comes out to see what all the noise is about. He offers to help. So let's use him for the big stuff: weeding the overgrown mess by the sheep shed that this year will be turned into bed number 10, both (a) and (b).

Ever the efficiency expert, he tells me that we are using too much energy for too little gain. He brings out the tiller. That helps a little, but still, the weeds are intense here. I shovel, he tills, I pull, he rakes. After one or two or was it ten hours, we are spent. This is when it hits me: maybe I've taken on too much? Maybe I can't plant a million seeds and a thousand flowers. And take care of all the flowers that are here already (requiring weeding, splitting, moving, pruning.

Well maybe. Maybe it is too much. Still, I see the first signs of the work I did last autumn in planting bulbs:

It's so satisfying, watching spring plants emerge! So deeply satisfying!

I remind myself that we are in day number 362 of isolation. No one comes here (except for the grandkids now). No one sees the gardens I create. 

And yet, it's so deeply satisfying to walk in a field of lilies and snip their spent heads so that new ones will be so very beautiful to behold. So for now, we clean the beds. One or two hours, every day, until planting time.