simultaneous garden progress... and lack of progress?
I am super excited to be ready to post about a few things happening that are happening now! It's early in the morning and I'm supposed to be working on the farm books for a meeting with the accountant TODAY, but instead I wanted to get some writing down to share with everyone that I made my tea this morning in a cup with a dead fly in it. Chris isn't awake yet for me to complain. He bought me this super fancy teacup that keeps the tea at your perfect temperature which you get to set (126 F for me), so it sits on the counter on the charger where apparently dead flies can collect. I didn't notice until the cup was ready to drink. Delightful.
I was thinking today about how I write a lot here about progress we make, and I show photos of completed projects, and that may give readers an unrealistic idea about how things go around here. I'm not trying to conceal our failures, it's just harder to write about the absence of progress, you know? Those posts would be significantly shorter at any rate.
We were working on winterizing the pool area and I walked through the garden which I have been completely neglecting since the strawberry harvest was over. Guilt isn't a useful emotion in this situation, but I feel so guilty for letting everything get so overgrown. It makes my stomach hurt a little. In the spring we planted everything (trees, bushes, and brambles) and started putting down plastic and mulch to kill the surrounding grass, but we didn't get very far. Chris has been taking care of it to the best of his ability while trying not to totally destroy the plants or the irrigation system, but even the most devoted gardening enthusiasts lose ambition by this time of year. The little plants are almost totally shaded, not ideal for going into what could be a long winter. I do have a plan for putting down a bunch of weed blocking plastic once everything dies back, and I even ordered the plastic, but it didn't stop the walk through today from feeling lousy.
It was 80 degrees today with full sunshine so it felt like the die off was much further off than it actually is which may. be part of the reason I took it hard. I just have this expectation of myself to keep up on everything - all the time, and obviously I have never met this expectation. The garden is just an example of one of the nausea inducing personal failures that are in progress at the moment.
HOWEVER! I do have some garden work - not plant based - to update here! After filling the barn gutters we had about 6 tons of stone left over. (There is no point in paying to truck a partial load of gravel when we can always find somewhere to put it.) We weren't planning to start on the garden paths this year, but the timeline was moving forward!!
My mom and stepdad were on hand for this project which was super helpful! We put super heavy duty weed blocking fabric down, hammered some edging in to hold it down and keep the gravel where we want it and then put the stone on! It went super fast and was such a satisfying day! The main paths are over halfway done, in the spring we just need to add the other two spokes to divide the area into quadrants. It worked out so well, I think we are going to do gravel between the garden beds too.
August 2023 also marks our triumphant return to The Great New York State Fair! We missed last year because of a little thing like... moving an entire farm! Before that was a minor global pandemic that really put a damper on our access to day drinking and fancy chickens. I mean, we still had access to day drinking and regular chickens, so we were really lucky in that regard.
