It's Planting Time? Then Where's my Garden Deva?

It is finally time to start planting seeds in the garden.  We have 13 beds constructed and 9 of them are filled with the awesome soil that we built.  The bed building ended up being a 2-person job as I have just not developed the upper body strength to enable me to manhandle getting those 3 inch deck screws all the way in.  I had hoped that my husband, who enjoys woodworking, would be the second person and we would push these things out like clockwork, but that proved not to be the case. 

So I just became more flexible as I know this is one of my lessons.  Moving from one task to another depending on the weather and who if anyone was available to help me.  After we had about half a dozen beds complete and I had no help, I started moving dirt instead of building. 

I needed to clear out a row of the finished dirt so that a bed could be laid down on the hard-pack clay dirt and later refilled.  After the first row was cleared my body began complaining.  I did some iliopsosas stretches, took some homeopathic Arnica and took a couple of days off from bending over and shoveling.  But when I got help placing the beds and started filling them by clearing out the next row and walkway, my body just about quit.   

So I got even more flexible.  This time I called Nick Fox, a local young man who did not have a summer job and asked if he would like to come and assist me for $8 per hour.  Now up until this time all of our work has been on a volunteer basis but his aunt said she would help to defray some of the cost so I went for it.  He had already done an ROP construction course so he was good at handling the power tools so I provided the counter pressure and together we finished building all of the 20 beds.  Then we worked together to place, fill and water them.

Nick Fox

Nick shoveling and Claudia watering.

N

Basically all of the first year building of the garden is done.  I can invest no more money into materials and no more free wood has materialized.  There are about 9 more beds that this space can handle, 5 of which are needed if we want to grow corn or sunflowers.  But we do have the meditation bench installed with two large terra cotta planters thanks to Nick and Christopher Fox.

Meditation Bench minus the flowers

And now it is time to plant. 

I should be really excited but my life has taken a really weird turn over this last month.  Up to now I have been using my connection to Nature to guide me in all of this, but I do not feel like I am getting a good connection for the planting and I can't figure out why.  Over the last couple of weeks when this has happened I just moved on to something else, tried to get more flexible, shoveled more dirt.  But there is just so much life hitting me in the face that I can't seem to find my focus anymore.  We planted one 8 foot bed but I am not happy with it.  I am almost sure that we have too many plants all stuck together and it looks as though melons should have been planted at least a month ago at the latest, although the beans will probably do well.

Besides not feeling connected I am being presented with a myriad of other situations that affect the garden and my back is not letting me continue to shovel dirt every day like my mind would like it to.  The landlord finally admitted that there was an ulterior motive to changing from a long term rental to a short term rental agreement and that he will be raising the rent in January by at least $300 per month.  My husband has become increasingly ill and has not been able to help out around the house, much less the property and depends on me to even schedule out what he should try and accomplish each day.  He is also going to be scheduled for surgery within the next 2 months which will take him out of commission for at least 2 months, assuming everything goes well and his compromised health does not impede his healing.   I am even wondering if we need to move somewhere in town to a small place with nothing outdoors to take care of and for me to get a traditional 9 to 5 job. 

You see, as I continue on my healing journey and get healthier and healthier, my husband is on his journey and gets sicker and sicker.  Even though we both have suffered from the same ailments and for the same reasons (depression and colitis), I got indignant when the medical community said they didn’t know what else to do for me, meanwhile I have watched my husband fall into despair and accept their last ditch effort by cutting out parts of his body.  I guess if it had worked I wouldn’t be so worked up, but unfortunately it did not.  One year after a surgery where he almost died and spent 3 weeks in the hospital, where they removed his entire colon, his physical and mental condition is close to the same as it was before the operation.  Why?  Because he has lifestyle diseases and he has not done enough lifestyle changes (in my humble opinion and those of most Naturopathic Doctors) and his medical doctors do not prescribe changes in lifestyle, just more medication, surgery and electroshock therapy.

I was surprised to learn today that my husband did not really understand my motivation for this garden.  I did not build it just because I love to grow stuff, although it is this thought that keeps me shoveling even when I want to give up.  I did not build it because I liked the work of building it, in fact it has been a lot of really hard physical work.  It is a concept I am after here.  I am building and growing this garden because of how important I think it is to help others learn to eat well and stay healthy.  I have named each of the four rows of beds after my grandchildren because I don’t want them to grow up learning to eat poor quality food like I did.  I don’t want my grandchildren to be plagued by preventable diseases like diabetes and depression that they have genetically inherited tendencies towards because of addictions to white flour, white sugar and processed foods.

A few years ago I realized that as our retirement accounts are dwindling that I would need to work for most if not all of the rest of my life.  Well I mused, in that case I had better get healthy now so that I can work and enjoy life and I had best find something to do that I love so that I never have to feel like I am working.  I can honestly say that I feel better than I have in years and I know I will feel even better when I figure out how to use my passion for healthy eating and Myofascial release healing to pay the rent.  Until then, I am as always, on the road.

While The Dirt Has Been Cooking

I am almost to the end of the thirty-day soil cooking process.  The next step is to add more amendments and do more roto tilling.  In order to do the next roto tilling however I must depend on my volunteers and their schedules.  I am not used to this.  I like being able to make a plan and stick to it.  I have been learning a lot about being flexible and going with the flow but this is all really different for me.  But I have no trailer hitch and I don’t have enough strength yet to do more than one pass per day and we need to make three passes this time.

I may have gotten myself a bit off the garden track.  I had hoped to spend this thirty-day period determining exactly what we would grow, starting some seeds and how it would all be inter-planted into the garden.  Instead I was met by the needs of a bookkeeping client and my own need to generate greenbacks for the family,

my need to spend some quality time with my oldest grandchildren... 

and my need to see my youngest niece graduate from Downey High School...

And because we were in SoCal we couldn't pass up the chance to hike in the Laguna Canyon Wilderness Park where my husband and I were once hiking docents...

All of these things seemed easy enough to handle, but the garden piece didn’t happen like I had planned.   I keep reminding myself that I worked on a lot of relationships and that those are what matters most but I am not at all happy with my relationship with the garden.  I did make a full scale drawing of the garden, its three areas and its thirty beds and we did go to the People’s Market and passed out flyers and networked, twice.  But I am just not feeling like I have done enough I guess.

I have found once again that being away from something long enough and letting my system unwind and then returning to it again really underscores the previously un-noticed impact.  It happened the first time when I left my homeland of almost 40 years and moved from Southern California to Farmington, New Mexico, a quiet little town in the four corners, high desert area.    After some months I came back to visit and flew into John Wayne airport in Orange County and as I disembarked from the plane I walked literally into a wall of frenetic energy.  I used to live in this 24/7 I remember thinking to myself.

Recently the same thing happened while assisting my bookkeeping client.  I used to sit in front of a computer for eight to ten hours a day and I never thought it bothered me.  Now I am there for only six hours and even though I take stretch breaks and lunch breaks that include a little Tai Chi when I come home I head straight for my back deck where I can bask in the breeze and the energy of the trees that surround the house.  I come home tired in a way I can’t quite describe that is different from the physical work of the garden.

I also had a much more difficult time being in the Los Angeles area in June.  I thought it was the cumulative effect of traveling and staying there three times in three months together with the unending noise and vibration of sleeping next to the Santa Ana Freeway.  We stayed for three weeks in a row during our first trip but we stayed in a home that was a few miles from the freeway and it seemed to make a big difference for me, or so I thought. 

What I finally figured out was that I had also increased my consumption of caffeine by virtue of drinking what seemed like a harmless iced tea each day on top of my daily cup of green tea.  Whew, what a mistake that was.  My whole system was affected and I was much less able to handle the energy of Los Angeles.  So on the drive home I stuck to water and my edginess all but disappeared.

So my advice for the day; listen to what your body is telling you, keep well hydrated with clean, pure, fresh water (buy a Brita filter and a stainless steel bottle) and cut out the caffeine, especially during these Dog Days of summer.  Of course we already know that alcohol is dehydrating.  Enough said.