Feeling better
Oct. 22nd, 2013 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI may perhaps have been a little tense. But the great Ray Greer came over and therapeutically massaged both of us, and we are both much happier in our bodies now (albeit in my case earwormed with the unfortunate Gilbert O'Sullivan).
And I have been out in the yard this afternoon, working with spade and trowel and fingers on the vegetable bed. This is stage two of the undoubtedly never-ending battle with the revolting creeping grass, which surged through the cardboard cover to reestablish itself all around the tomatoes and the chillies - but there is something actually curiously satisfying about working out every rootlet with my fingers. Simply the fact that I can do that is tremendously pleasing, given how the soil was six months ago, great clods of clay, unbreakable by hand. It is still far from a lovely friable tilth, but we're making progress far quicker than I anticipated. Just as one measure, there are so many more worms than the first time I dug it over. Worms in every spadeful. Teeny-tiny worms, and I don't know if they'll grow or if they're just a teeny-tiny species, but they are very welcome in either case. And as soon as I've finished digging the plot over I'll work in a whole lot of compost from my own bin and from the city (we get free compost and free bark-mulch, as much as we like, as often as we want to go and fetch it; I love California), which I am sure will be welcome to the worms, and the soil will just keep getting better and better.
Whether I'll get my winter seeds in before we fly to England is becoming a bit of an open question, but hey. Either way.
One thing I will get in before England is a trip to Common Ground in Palo Alto. Where they claim, inter alia, to sell proper English garden forks. I'm not going to risk a third cheap American one. I'd rather pay the price for real quality.
Darling of the day, from Mars Beneath, on the hypnotic nature of travel:
Landscape unwinds itself, at whatever speed, from Shanks' pony to a Zeppelin's deceptive drift; change and strangeness and curiosity combine into a weight of expectation, a mute upon the tongue and a stillness in the eyes.
Or that's how I find it, at least. I can be awfully quiet in a car.
And I have been out in the yard this afternoon, working with spade and trowel and fingers on the vegetable bed. This is stage two of the undoubtedly never-ending battle with the revolting creeping grass, which surged through the cardboard cover to reestablish itself all around the tomatoes and the chillies - but there is something actually curiously satisfying about working out every rootlet with my fingers. Simply the fact that I can do that is tremendously pleasing, given how the soil was six months ago, great clods of clay, unbreakable by hand. It is still far from a lovely friable tilth, but we're making progress far quicker than I anticipated. Just as one measure, there are so many more worms than the first time I dug it over. Worms in every spadeful. Teeny-tiny worms, and I don't know if they'll grow or if they're just a teeny-tiny species, but they are very welcome in either case. And as soon as I've finished digging the plot over I'll work in a whole lot of compost from my own bin and from the city (we get free compost and free bark-mulch, as much as we like, as often as we want to go and fetch it; I love California), which I am sure will be welcome to the worms, and the soil will just keep getting better and better.
Whether I'll get my winter seeds in before we fly to England is becoming a bit of an open question, but hey. Either way.
One thing I will get in before England is a trip to Common Ground in Palo Alto. Where they claim, inter alia, to sell proper English garden forks. I'm not going to risk a third cheap American one. I'd rather pay the price for real quality.
Darling of the day, from Mars Beneath, on the hypnotic nature of travel:
Landscape unwinds itself, at whatever speed, from Shanks' pony to a Zeppelin's deceptive drift; change and strangeness and curiosity combine into a weight of expectation, a mute upon the tongue and a stillness in the eyes.
Or that's how I find it, at least. I can be awfully quiet in a car.