Tag: gardening

Late Winter Gardening

a large seed head of an aster flower

It’s been an endless week, one day bleeding into the next. A blur of gathering with people, sitting immobile in my big chair in pain, doom-scrolling on the sly (from my better selves), and then (finally) I got out into the garden. I’m trying to get out there more often. I’m always saying that, and the struggle is real. When I go out there I rarely want to come back in. I’m always pushing myself in ways my body tells me is stupid and mean to my future self. It’s an ongoing argument that both sides of me win. I’m in more pain today. Have spent half of it on ice. My back hurts the most, but my knee too, has been exacerbated.

But it felt SO GOOD. Everything gets quieter in this messy loud head of mine when I’m in the garden. I love how it feels to use my muscles to dig plants in – and dig other plants out. I love how it feels to pull out the sour-grass in large heavy clumps that I dump in the compost like a visual sigh of relief. I love the smell of the soil. I love removing dead growth from perennials and trees, shaping them up for the best possible spring growth season.

Even when I look around and see the chaos of what I haven’t done and may never get to, I’m still okay. Acres of sour-grass I’ll never conquer, the blood peach I have never yet truly pruned because it’s still a bit spindly… I know the way to help it get more lush is to prune it. It’s okay. It’s really okay out there with the plants. The Pink Pearl apple has developed burr knots and what looks like fire-blight. I might be able to save it by cutting all that off. Or I might be more comfortable taking it out altogether. It’s okay.

We all have to go sometime. I’m okay making these choices in my garden. I’ve had to make similar choices with my beloved animals too. Sometimes your heart breaks a little, or a lot, but I’m okay making the choices. I trust that I’m always working towards the best outcome possible for my whole ecosystem.

Gonna need to work on balancing what my body can handle (and what’s healthy for it) with what my mind needs (and what’s healthy for it). Hardest thing in the world to do when you’ve spent a lot of time in survival mode. So much longer than most (maybe any) people know. So I pushed myself yesterday because it was so good for my heart and my head.

I started pruning the Sevillano olive. We moved it so many times to find where it could thrive that I haven’t ever pruned it since we bought it. The Manzanilla is next. It’s probably some function of human hubris that makes me think I can hear the plants, but I do. I do think I can hear them, and it’s an unwritten and non-vocal language I speak.

I love the winter garden here in California. That I get to go out in it is such a deep blessing. The dead growth, though not as dramatic as places with deep long freezes, is still somehow breathtaking. Expired plants, having reached the end of their season, surrender to the long process of decay. At the same time, seedlings from some plants have already emerged.

Graveyards and creches nearly touching at all times. The circle of life and death in the garden is close and unguarded. Out in the garden it feels exactly as it should be. Seedlings bursting up and out into life next to the corpses of the plants that created them.

Out in the garden, I feel exactly as I should be.

Weeding the Hellstrip

earthworm in sunny hand

I frequently forget how much spending time in my garden makes me feel better about the world I live in and improves my sense of well being and hope overall. The chronic pain has eaten so deeply into my physical abilities that gardening in the last few years has been a mostly a limping limited activity. When you’re back goes out you literally can’t “power through the pain”. When your arthritic knees give out on you – it becomes dangerous to ignore it and go working in the garden anyway. Especially since the ground is uneven. So I forget the level of vigor it restores to my mental health.

This year I need to make it a priority to get out there most days even if it’s just to walk from one end of it to the other to see what’s going on. Just looking at (and talking to) the plants makes me feel better. I belong with them more than I belong in the human world. They don’t judge or lie or have an agenda other than to first survive, and then to thrive. That’s pure and it’s simple.

First survive, then thrive.

sidewalk garden patch with foot in the picture

For some reason, my thoughts just skipped to the importance of editing the garden. I was in the ICU visiting my mother on Wednesday and told her about finally getting a Kalamata olive tree. I told her I now needed to get rid of the two little olives I bought last year. She said I should keep them (like Philip proposed I do) and wanted a full explanation for why I plan to give them away. It’s so weird for her to care if I keep or give a plant away. When she had her own gardens she would get rid of things she didn’t want anymore or didn’t belong in them. She was good at editing those spaces. But all the years she worked in and had opinions about MY gardens, she gasps dramatically every time I tell her I’m culling some plant or other out.

I’m a master gardener. I let a lot of chaos reign over my gardens by choice. I like things to be spilling over each other. I like a sense of abundance. But one thing I have learned is vital for a healthy garden, is editing what you plant in it. You buy plants to try them out, some thrive, some die. Some of the ones that thrive it turns out aren’t behaving the way you expected them too, maybe they’re bullying other plants – so you have to compost them or give them to a gardening friend. You make mistakes in your purchases and you adjust.

The editing process is part of the joy and beauty of gardening. Every landscape you work on is constantly evolving due to the climate changing, soil changes, maturing plants, diseases, infestations, and additions. It’s never boring.

I trust myself with my garden process and choices. Not that they’ll always be good or that I won’t ever change my mind, but because I understand that that’s the process and that I’m always making decisions based on my knowledge of plants, research, and vision.

It’s been raining a lot (which I LOVE) and that’s suited the situation I’ve been in trying to process and handle (my dad cutting off our relationship in response to me confronting him about the abuse). I’ve been super internal. But now the sun is out for the next few days in time for me feeling lighter from the weight of family secrets being OVER and in time to notice that the world outside is (politically, socially, culturally) darker than ever before in my lifetime.

Time to get out there and work in the garden! So much weeding needs doing. I love weeding. I was about to comment that I need to make food instead of going outside. I think I’ll go outside and weed for about 20 minutes, then cook food.