Hello. It’s me.

I have not thought about us for a long, long time.

Maybe I would have been better off if I had.

I have to be careful about writing such things, for surely someone, somewhere, will assume I mean someone by those statements. The only someone I mean is myself; it is an example of how a joke-ish reference to a song from the 1970’s can turn on a proverbial dime to a bit of introspection. Once you say the words out loud, though, they become targets for misinterpretation. You can’t really know who is accidentally overhearing when you are talking to yourself.

Garden Wank

So much lost since our last talk. Top left to right; a sample of things actually harvested and the remains of the golden raspberry bed. Below left to right; gooseberries struggling in early July, a precious few goldens from the few stunted and remaining plants.

It’s been a difficult couple of years for gardening, just as it was in the years before, and I am kind of amazed by how life and its curveballs can smack the crap out of my plans. Every time I think I got a workaround figured out for all my failings and all the world’s flingings, life, the universe, and everything conspires to show me just how mistaken I am. I expect I will be bitching about this into eternity; the arrogance of hopeful self-delusion is a particular weak point in most humans, including me. I am always hoping that this will be the year I don’t fall flat on my face for some thing or another. 🙂

And here I am, again, picking myself up, again, mildly cussin’ and stompin’ about falling immeasurably short of my personal expectations, again. Alas.

So, anyway, I had to have my roof redone a few years ago, and it was a terrifying project, involving the tear-off of 5 layers of roofing, thanks to the previous homeowner’s tendency to just throw more shingles up when it was time to fix things. I’ve no idea at what point the local building codes stopped allowing more than three layers, but clearly it was either after I bought the house, or the magic words “homeowner repair” bought more forgiveness for blatant code violations back then.

You might reasonably ask “What does this have to do with garden wankery?” Well, I am here to tell you!

The roofers did in about half my garden beds. The barren raspberry bed pictured above is perfect evidence of the results. They set their ladders up in my raised beds, they threw the asphalt shingles on the ground, they walked all over everything. I have very mixed feelings about how that re-roofing played out; they did a tough job that needed doing, but they pretty much ruined 50% of my planted yard and they had to come back to repair their work.

On a side note, let us not even discuss the mess they made in the attic. M can’t even talk about it without words like “devastation,” “heartbroken,” and “catastrophe.”

I tried establishing some black raspberries over in the AS50 bed, but all I can say about that is “at lEaSt SoMe oF tHe PlAntS mAde iT tHrU tHe wInTer.” I am just going to have to look at what is in the back section of the house that can be moved and to where it can be moved in order to establish new permanent beds. Mother pussbucket, sez I.

The other thing that has made me quite unhappy is the loss of a good selection of my seeds. I mean, I’ve lost them. And it is, of course, some seeds I can not replace, like the carlin peas. I am hoping that I can at least locate one of the little pill bottles I had full of peas and beans I meant to eat rather than to save for seed. I might be able to rescue some of them. During the course of the lock down, things got rearranged, and I have no idea where they got buried (other than not in my garden). The pandemic also took out my favorite tomato grower’s business, so I had no access to the varieties I most desire. And of course, I had to compete with other gardeners for the reduced supply of plant starts. AND the weather has been terrible, from the worst coolness to the excessive heat, cycling between the two rapidly and repeatedly, and oh, YEAH, the period of drought. Gah. I was not fit for the task that I wanted to do, I could only manage a shadow. There you go, Universe keepin’ me humble.

I did get to visit my cousin in Indiana and my friend in Illinois, both of whom have better growing seasons than I do, and I keep the memories of their beautiful gardens in my mind’s eye. I can get back there, I can get back to that niceness, I can, I can! I just have to replace all the dirt and start over! There is no arrogant self-delusion in that personal expectation at all!

Writing it down helps. That is why I am here today! There isn’t a lot of harvest talk here, because that’s not the most salient thing–or rather, the lack of a notable harvest is, in fact, the salient point and I need to plan to make next year better than this one. I’ll work on that through this medium. Next Harvest Monday, I hope to limit myself just to what happened since this entry, rather than try to cover the last 2 years. 🙂