farming Archives - magic is everywhere

Quick, cheap and delicious

It’s so easy for me to get distracted and forget to look for the magic.

Work has been bonkers. People are leaning on me really hard for stuff and I find it impossible to say no. (I’m working on it.) Consequently there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

I planned to stay up all night on Wednesday to finish (maybe?) a project that was due that day, but the internet went out at 3:00 am. Pretty fatal for a web developer (at least while working on a live site).

John was relieved because I’d been pushing for two weeks and he could see I needed rest. But I couldn’t sleep. I was too hyped up on stimulants (which I consumed because I thought I would be staying up all night and the whole next day).

At 7 am, the internet was still out. So I went to Sheetz, which has a quiet eating area with power outlets, free wifi and good coffee. I was miserable. I just wanted to go home. But I kept getting texts and emails from clients asking for updates. And then the lunch rush started and my anxiety kicked into overdrive, and I found myself desperately texting John. “IS THE INTERNET ON YET? PLEASE ANSWER ME.”

Guys, Thursday was the closest I’ve come to having a nervous breakdown, and I’ve come close before.

It took me two days to come down from the caffeine high. During that time it slowly dawned on me (again) that this is my life. It doesn’t belong to anyone else, least of all clients. I have to learn to say no, or at least “not now.”

This morning I remembered to look for the magic. The voice was turned up to 11 the entire time (YOU SHOULD BE WORKING!) but I looked for the magic anyway.

First I knitted a few rows in John’s scarf, but that seemed daunting because it’ll be quite a while before I finish. So I put down the knitting and gathered up the ingredients for pesto.

I had been thinking about making pesto because a) I love pesto and b) we have an enormous basil plant outside. I love basil and put it on lots of things, but I wasn’t making a dent in the plant.

Until recently, when I wanted pesto, I reached for a jar we got from Costco. The problem is we are out of Costco pesto and we can’t go to Costco without spending $400, which is about $350 more than I have right now (despite all the working). When I realized that making my own pesto meant we could actually have pesto without anyone going to Costco, I was sold.

Anyway, we had most of the stuff. Just a quick trip to Walmart for pine nuts and fresh parmesan, and…

The magic of this little jar of pesto isn’t in the home-grown basil or the easy recipe. It’s in the way it made me feel when I made it. Calm, secure, and fundamentally okay.

I don’t know how it works, but it works.

September 19, 2021

That’s all

Sometimes life is busy. Sometimes deadlines are overwhelming. And you get a little lost in it all. You forget to look for the magic.

And other days this happens:

And when it does, you remember that life is abundance.

You breathe in and see it’s one big circle.

You breathe out and remember we’re all here to spiral upward, one lesson at a time.

You breathe in and know this is one of those lessons.

You breathe out…

That’s all.

Seriously, that’s all.

September 13, 2021

Garden Update

And all this time, the garden has been doing its thing.

Gardening might be my favorite kind of magic because you do all the work up front. Then, one day, you go outside to enjoy the nice weather and surprise! You have veggies.

It’s been raining a lot where we are, and the weather turned cooler than normal, so even though it’s already September, we have a bajillion green tomatoes and only occasional red ones.

Green tomatoes — So many green cherry toms

We need a little heat wave please! Or at least a string of sunny days.

Meanwhile, we have beans! Remember those?

I was so excited when these guys sprouted!

And here they are!

The zucchini, yellow squash and cucumbers are also doing well. Hoping for a harvest in the next few weeks.

September 2, 2021

Gardenia

Gentle reader, meet our long-awaited gardenia blossom. ❤️🌼

August 23, 2021

The beginnings of an orchard?

Get out your magnifying glass and check out this extreme closeup of our new orchard:

This is by far the craziest idea we’ve had so far. What would happen if I took this peach pit and stuck it in dirt? Would we get a peach tree? Like a for-real peach tree?

You guys, the world is full of magic.

Is that actually a peach seedling, or just some stray seed that got blown into the pot?

Only time will tell. Stay tuned!

August 21, 2021

First toms of 2021

They’re going on a salad tout de suite!

August 7, 2021

Veggie Update

The garden is going gangbusters! Here are my favorite shots:

You guys. There are plants and they’re growing! I’m so excited.

August 2, 2021

Prepping for seedlings

I am so excited about growing stuff. Like stupid excited.

About 10 days ago, I planted beans. What I mean is I actually put beans in the ground and covered them with dirt. Now they look like this:

Bean plants — Multi-colored beans grown from seeds

Take that, Jack!

(That was a Jack and the Beanstalk reference, in case you missed it.)

Filling the Pots

Anyway, John suggested that we use some of our 4 cubic yards of dirt to fill pots for next year’s seedlings. Brilliant! So I did it. Then I lined them up in trays and it looked so cool, I took a photo:

Seed pots — Pinterest-worthy shot of my seedling pots

Interlude

After I filled the pots, I left them on the grass and went back to working on the driveway.

La la la. Stuff happened. Here’s a cute photo of our dogs to pass the time:

The Horror

A little while later, the driveway was finished and John decided to park the truck on it.

Oh god. The humanity.

My screams could not penetrate the air conditioned comfort of the truck’s cab as he ran squarely over my pots.

Broken pots — Oh dear pots, my heart breaks for thee.

Squished!

Since eye-witness testimony is sketchy at best, I did a quick forensic evaluation, which I learned about from television. I submit that the tire tracks in this photo match the right front tire of the defendant’s RAM 1500 on all class characteristics. I also found 18 matching individual characteristics.

So basically, he’s dead.

No not really. I still love him, even though he squished the pots. He even suggested I take this photo to document the act for blogging purposes. You can see how weary and heartbroken I was by the coating of stone dust on my shoe.

I was able to salvage most of them, and even distributed the dirt from the tire-track pot to other pots that were mangled, but not fatally.

So here’s to future seedlings! You are the true survivors.

July 31, 2021

Dirt

So my husband ordered dirt.

A lot of dirt.

I’m told it’s “four cubic yards” of dirt. Which is much more than you think it is. Here’s a video I found that proves that:

A dump truck just like this dumped this amount of dirt on my driveway (but this is not my driveway).

He also ordered one ton of gravel. I always thought one ton was the same as 2,000 pounds but turns out it’s actually more like 47,000 pounds. I know because John and I personally moved all of it from one place to another with a shovel. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Space

Last fall, John and I pulled a Green Acres and moved to the country. At last we would have space for all the belongings that two people can possibly accumulate before finding each other later in life. (Our stuff had exceeded the capacity of our two-bedroom apartment and filled, not one, but two large storage spaces.)

Our new home is a 1930 Craftsman with full, unfinished basement and attic. It sits on about half an acre, with a large barn in back. Half an acre may not seem like much, but to former apartment dwellers like us, it’s expansive.

More important than the physical space, though, is the mental space. We’re both creative, introverted people and we needed a place for our energy to spread out without bumping into other people on all sides.

So we moved to the country. And we had plans. So many plans. We envisioned our large lot as a kind of practice farm, where we could hone our farming skills before buying a bigger, even more remote piece of property in about five years.

Why the dirt?

It started with a garden.

My parents had a big vegetable garden, and John had one for a time as well. We wanted to set aside part of the space to grow our own veggies. We decided to build some raised beds and plant with abandon. This, of course, required that we shovel the dirt into a cart and drag it halfway across the yard, load by load, to fill the beds.

Next, we wanted a wildflower garden. I’m a sucker for wildflowers. And of course I’m going to raise bees. Obviously. So we need pollen. This meant dragging even more carts of dirt to another spot in the yard. There’s progress on that (at least in the dragging dirt department):

These two projects, along with a few smaller planting beds and some pots for seedlings, made 4 cubic yards of dirt seem like a good idea. And it was! Not only did we get all these projects off to a grand start, but we grew new muscles in the process.

We couldn’t be more excited about our shiny new farming skills. And the beans. (Especially the beans!)

And the gravel? Well that’s a subject for another post.

July 31, 2021