Pardon the Garden

Dreams

As Fiona Apple sings: “I don’t go to sleep to dream.”

I don’t dream. Or if I do, I certainly don’t know it. Nights that I’m conscious of my dream(s) I don’t sleep well, and the dreams are never something nice/happy.

I’m a natural skeptic. I want to believe in something but I have a hard time believing in anything. But dreams… I tend to look into the meaning of my dreams. The dreams usually occur when I’m in serious need of some soul searching or some introspective “me” time.

With the things going on in life right now, it’s a good possibility my subconscious is trying to tell me something. There’s been a whirlwind of information thrown my way these last few weeks that has been difficult to process. It’s brought up a lot of buried emotions. A lot of anger. A lot of pain. A lot of bitterness. Things I thought were behind me.

And maybe it is… Someone told me once that you move on and learn to cope but it still hurts. It’s something that sticks with you. It’s part of who you are and what makes up you as a person. I’m who I am today because of my past. My strengths and insecurities. I have habits, behaviors, and attitudes that are rooted in that anger and pain – both good and bad.

I found old writings from that period of my life. They’re a big clue into what made me… Me. They’re also incredibly sad and slightly disturbing. I needed therapy, I received religious rhetoric instead. I didn’t need scriptures or speeches about how a god I didn’t believe in would fix me. And I certainly didn’t need to be told that I’m “beautiful on the outside, ugly on the inside.” I needed counseling. I needed someone to vent to who wouldn’t tell me all the reasons/ways I was wrong simply because those beliefs were contrary to what they believed.

It’s no wonder I so instinctively put up walls to protect myself, or that I am so reluctant to be myself around people.

On a whim

Monday I decided, on a whim, to dye some fiber. I had egg coloring kits on hand, and I had fiber fluff, and I had a Monday at home to clean and dye fiber in between work projects. Ahhh the joys of being your own boss at least part of the time!

What I started out with was a few handfuls of alpaca fluff. It’s a really pretty fiber – grays with bits of black. I initially thought I’d spin it up as-is, but then I decided I have a whole pound of the stuff so who cares! Dye that sh*t up!

I went for orange, yellow, and red. Mainly because pretty much any other color combination didn’t appeal to me whatsoever. The fact that the fiber was so mixed in natural color made for some interesting dyed fiber. At least while it was wet/in the dye bath.

Annnnnd then it dried. And look at that – bright yellow, bright pink….. and a really ugly orange.

Damn. Not at all what I was hoping for. Maybe it’ll spin up nice and pretty?  I was hoping to have a nice bright orange to match. I had a mind to make a pretty little cowl out of this, with both singles spun and plied one color to the next in long blocks to almost have a graduated effect.  Now it’s just going to be bright yellow and bright pink on the ends with a muddled middle. Not cool.

Let’s fail better this year

Today was a day for garden work. Yesterday the Mr tilled and expanded our planting area. Which really wasn’t an expansion at all because while we’re widening it, we’re also leaving very well defined walking areas. It’s my way of making designated planting beds without the expense of raised beds (which we just can’t afford – wood plus soil to fill them with is very much out of our price range for the size/number of beds we want).

We used tent stakes to mark out where our corners of our boxes were, and then I used cotton yarn leftovers to draw them out. We’ve had this idea in place for months now, but just seeing that even bigger plot of dirt freaked me out and made me think that maybe this was a huge mistake. I’m normally able to visualize things, but I just couldn’t do it today. So the yarn lines definitely helped.

The garden is broken up into 4 quadrants, with 3 ‘beds’ in each one. The idea is that this will make it easy to rotate crops year-to-year, which we haven’t really been doing much since we bought the house and put in the garden. We’ll be mulching the planting areas, and I’m not sure what we’ll do with the paths between all the beds. I would love to have the whole thing laid out with landscaping tiles or bricks. Maybe even just some simple stepping stones here and there with some sort of low-growing ground cover plant. Hell, I’d even be happy with grass. I’m just happy to have really, truly defined growing beds instead of one big mess like we’ve had every other year.

Today we planted almost everything, though technically our frost date isn’t until later this week. (Mother Nature might smack my happy ass back to reality on that and ruin everything, but I’m hoping not.) We have 3 rows of tomatoes, celery, kale, radishes, beets, eggplant, peppers (bell and jalapeno), tomatillo, corn, beans (both green for eating fresh and black for drying and cooking), cucumber, and squash. I have 1 ‘bed’ left open that is being held for zucchini and summer squash plants that still need purchased.

Later this week/weekend we’re going to be putting in the trellises. We were both just too tired after yard work today to plant and build trellises, but the plants needed in the ground ASAP as I have a tendency to kill things in containers. And since I had to spend $40 on plants after I failed miserably on seed starting this year… I really didn’t want to lose even more money by letting plants die.

I did splurge at the store today and bought myself something different for one of my flower beds: a pretty, big-flowered begonia. I normally plant impatiens, but I saw these at the store and knew right away I had to have them!

Wet Jeans & Courage

This picture probably doesn’t look like much. But from the knees down, my jeans are soaked.

Today I had a whole new experience: riding my motorcycle in the rain.  I assure you it wasn’t intentional. And I worked myself up way too much over it throughout the day, dreading the moment I had to get back on the bike and face the music (or, rather, the raging storms that were blowing across my route home).

It took a lot of courage to get on that bike. And it took even more courage to start heading down the road. And then it took a whole new level of courage to not pull over as soon as the rain drops started pelting my face (Um, yeah, I need a new helmet. This little half one is great for around town, not for longer distances).  And you know what? It wasn’t that bad! Nice, even!

My handspun camel/merino shawl is done! I’m not 100% thrilled with the patten – it’s a little too boring for my tastes. But it sets off the gorgeous handspun yarn wonderfully.

Today marks the beginning of a whirlwind month. So many things going on and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to manage it. I need to make sure I am making time for my runs – the Memorial Day 5k I signed up for is coming up and I’m really hoping to run the entire race (even if I do run slower than I walk!).