Green = Happy

I am a gardener as much as I am a writer. I love watching my plants come up, sprout. bud, bloom, fruit. The whole process is a joy for me. This year I have the new addition to my yard my kiwi-berry vine and it is going to bloom. plus for the first time I believe I’m going to be able to harvest my red currant this year and all of my gooseberry are large and producing. My raspberry is healthy and I have 5 little beans poking their heads out of the soil.

I’m not saying gardening gets rid of my insanity, but working the garden – even just walking around and checking on it’s progress – I can feel the stress melt off my body. Now the opposite is true if I am battling with the chickens digging everything up or the sheep busting in and eating everything up ….  but as I have, for the most part, found solutions to those problems my plants are a means to grounding myself ( couldn’t help the pun) and finding the seed (help I can’t stop) of my peace. Once that peace has germinated, I can use it to push away the darkness and bloom into sun…. Alright I’ll stop but you get the point.

I think this is true of many hobbies. Something that is zen like, that is many faceted in it’s interactions and is both cerebral and physical. Alright I can’t think of many hobbies that fit that bill but I am sure there are.

Anyway, find your thing and remember it when you are struggling.

Could Be Age… Could Be Laziness

Yesterday, the sun was shining, the temperature was in the low twenties (mid sixties), and since I could do much for the truck, as it was charging, I decided to put a plant in the ground.

Last year, a friend of mine layered some shoot from her Kiwi-berry vine into a milk-crate and covered them over. The rooted and this spring I went and got the milk-crate and put it on my front porch. Just the other day I noticed that it was budding all over, and was overjoyed and realized I should get the thing in the ground.

A couple years ago now, we built a barn by using two shipping containers as side walls and putting a roof over them. It works great and we use one of the shipping containers as the chicken coop. The draw back is that the wall facing into the yard is a big, grey, corrugated metal slab. I decided that I should hide it the easiest and most natural way – with a vine.

So yesterday I combined the two – a vine that needed planting and a wall which needed covering. But there were some things that needed to happen – I couldn’t just stick the plant in the ground and walk away. We have sheep and chickens which means the vine had to be kept safe from both (sheep eat everything except adult thistles and chickens dig up every patch of exposed soil)

I had already built a ‘wall’ out of pallets the year before, and brought in some soil in hopes to raise some vegetables there. That experiment failed miserably (see -chickens). So Before I could plant the vine I had to re-secure the pallet wall, which I did by pounding metal T bars into the ground bracing the pallets. Then I dug up the hard compacted ‘floor’ of the old barn because it is about a foot thick in well aged sheep, and chicken, manure (plant growth gold!). Then I wheelbarrowed that across the soft muddy ground to the planting site, where I shovel the manure into place. Following which, I went and dug out the side of a clay pile, (created when the pond was re-dug) and wheelbarrowed that to the plant site and shovelled it then tamped it down over the manure to keep the chickens out (fingers crossed).

Now I had my soil but nothing for the vine to climb. So i pounded more T bars into the ground and dragged a length of chain-link fence to the site. I unravelled the fence (in itself an exercise worthy of a blog post) and stretched it between the posts and wired it on.

I was finally ready to plant…. after carrying the heavy milk crate from the front porch to the back of the property(1/3 acre). The only thing left was very carefully cutting away the milk crate from the plant with a grinder.

So I used many different muscle groups through out the day – and when I finally stopped (and when I woke up this morning) MAN, DID I HURT! So I have to wonder; is it my age finally telling me I can’t do all that I used to, or is it simply that over the winter I turned into a weak, lazy writer? I guess the answer to that will become clear as the season continues and I tackle more and more ‘projects’

At any rate, it’s in the ground and all the branches entwined with the fence. It will look lovely in a year or two and best of all it will bear clusters of delicious kiwi-berries … as long as the wild birds leave me any

But I Didn’t Fall Into the Rosebush!

It seems every July with my short but intense cycle I end up hurting myself. Once, I managed to cut the side of my finger with hedge trimmers. Later, when i tried to figure out how, I couldn’t force my fingers between the stationary ‘blades’ far enough to reproduce the thing. The most dramatic injury was while I was working at a window manufacturing plant. I was in charge of welding the vinyl corners together then slicing off the weld access. The blade was a long curved thing that was kept exceedingly sharp and I slide it into my wrist. I was lucky and buried that blade in the three to four millimetre gap between the tendon and the vein. This year my injury seems to be the stuff of slapstick – bad slapstick.

I was cutting weed to feed the sheep using a sickle (yes the thing on the USSR’s flag) and, as happens, I misgauged a bit and cut myself as well as the stocks of the greens I was holding. Usually you cut yourself against the curved part of the blade and it bleed a dribble or two and stops -I, however, managed to cut myself with the straight part of the newly sharpened blade. It cut deep and I was a gushing.
It hurt but soon was healing, mostly in part to the cut being a thin slice despite going more then a third through my finger tip near the base of the nail. But then two days after the original cut I managed to slam that finder in a door. I caught it good. I slammed it hard. And I did it right on the cut line. And cue the blood works – again.
So now my finger throbbed and it’s healing was set back to square one.
It was embarrassing but at least i had managed to stop myself from falling the stairs into the rose bush right by the door, I could at least comfort myself there.

So another couple days pass, the cut is healing nicely and I am out re-fencing a stretch of our yard. I am being careful with the finger, keeping out of the way and trying not to use it at all.
That was when our not so little any more lamb Lily decided to step on it.
…and cue the blood.

Burning the candle at both ends is bound to get wax on the keyboard

I am trying to maintain a schedule of edit/rewrite; my goal being an average of ten pages a night. I say average because that way I don’t beat myself up overly if I don’t do any work one night but pull off  fifteen pages on two other nights – it’s simply less pressure and I seem to actually accomplish more that way.

My current project is my paranormal investigator novel; ‘Tomorrow Wendell’ and I am enjoying the edit/rewrites I am doing. However, looming behind me and before me, actually,  is my other novel, the urban fantasy; ‘Veil’s Child’.

I am trying not to think about the fact that soon I will have to wade through all of the advice, comments, and suggestions made by my editor and proof readers so I can come out on the other side with as perfect a story as I can. My ability to put off the thinking about it is not perfect. An author friend directed my attention to a small press which may just be a perfect fit for the story and lately my wife’s reading and commenting on same have brought that novel further to my attention (not that I haven’t loved having my wife’s thoughts – for more on that there is THIS). I know, however, I can’t divide my thoughts.

So I am dividing them anyways. – Yeah, I suck at following my own advice.  Have I mentioned I’m bi-polar?

Part of me is dreading, looking forward with enthusiasm, and already – editing the other novel. The other part is whistling a tune by a band named Creepshow so it can’t hear its partner and is eager to leap forward the moment my fingers touch the keys.

I am at the half way point with ‘Tomorrow Wendell’ and because it is on the shorter side of the term ‘Novel’ I won’t be at it too much longer, which is good. Once I’m done, I can shop it out to those patient people willing to read and comment on it while I make the necessary changes to ‘Veil’s Child’.  Which will, of coarse,  start the cycle all over again.

I have a few short stories I’d like to finish, and a couple novels I’d like to revisit, and even one or two I want to start. This could start getting dangerous for my mental health if I don’t sort it all out soon……

Oh – right.  Well they say you have to be crazy to want to be a writer…. I definitely have the first part down pat, lets hope I can score on the second half too.

And now I have to go as some sheep just stampeded through my living room…

The plot thickens…

No, sorry this blog post still isn’t about writing. The plot I’m talking about is the vegetable garden – again.

People are wired so differently from each other. I have a rich, loose, organic filled garden patch and a significant portion of that was because of work done by a man I had never meet. His wife was reading a FaceBook post about my needing to do further work on my garden and he told her that he’d do that – ‘it sounded like fun’.

So a woman I knew only from online contact – wrote me and said her husband was willing to dig up the floor in the old sheep barn and transfer that well composted, nutrient rich manure to my garden patch. It was a colossal job and he did it with a smile. I was dreading the thought of this essentially – last step in the process and he just came out and did it.

People are wired differently. Most people would not volunteer for that job, period, but to do so for someone your wife knows casually on-line ?

So now I have a garden to be envious of; in size, soil content, and function. I planted my seedlings yesterday, then put the seeds yet to be planted in separate containers to soak over night. Soon, I will scoop out the floating ‘dead’ seeds and then strain off the water and poke holes in the soil to embrace the new life.

I’m looking forward to seeing the plants grow and hopefully yield a nice crop but I am almost more excited about next year, and the year after, and the year after, and the…well, you get the idea. All the hard work has been done now – there will be some weeding to be done on a regular basis, and seeds and seedling to plant, but now, every spring, I can just plant on time, when they should be, in their designated spaces – and have more time to work on other projects.

But I really wouldn’t be where I am, the garden wouldn’t be ready, if it wasn’t for the volunteered time of a stranger.  That’s twice someone has read a comment on-line (once here, once on FB) and offered their time and energy to help me out.

Sometimes people can surprise you in all the right ways and these are two people. I’ve said it before to each of them but here it is again – thanks to Samantha, and now James, for your unsolicited aid.