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.