We are in the depths of winter here. Just a short while ago we had a hard freeze, leading to a busted water pipe, leading to unexpected expenses and mess. Meanwhile, the world is filled with war, death, chaos, mayhem, earthquakes, volcanoes, and much more.
Just trying to stay cheerful, here!
Of course, these things have always been around - at least to some degree - and it's my guess that we just have them far more in our faces thanks to the immediacy of the World Wide Web reporting everything pretty much as it happens.
Sometimes it all gets a bit much, and my temptation is just to turn the whole thing off. So I do.
It got a little bit warmer today, and the pervasive rain we almost always have here in the Pacific Northwest took a break for a few hours. So we wandered out into our vegetable garden space just to see what sort of damage had been done by winter, and to survey all the work ahead as we get into spring and out of the frost season.
Although we didn't do any actual work out there, simply being in the space where we grow our food was somewhat uplifting and a reminder that there are definitely good things in life!
Although our little vegetable patch is actually more than 15 years old, it has been growing year by year, and it has gained more and more importance, in terms of actually providing a substantial amount of our food every year.
2023 was not a great year in our garden, primarily because we had a very long, late and cold spring... and so, most of what we were growing got a very late start and the days started getting shorter and cooler before everything had a chance to fully ripen.
Even so, we enjoyed a lot of good fresh veg, some of which is pictured to illustrate this post.
In a sense, I'm actually quite grateful for the extreme cold snap we had last week because it's going to kill a bunch of the insects and insect eggs that would probably come up and damage our plants later on in the season. Up until that point we had had an unusually warm fall and early winter.
Our walk around the garden inspired us to come inside and start making some plans for the layout of the beds and what new things we might try growing here in 2024.
There's quite a lot of prep work to be done first. Aside from removing a lot of dead vegetation, weeding and mowing the paths between the beds, all those raised beds do need soil conditioning this year. We need to add more organic matter, and we need to really lighten things up a bit because some of the soil has become rather compacted and hard.
I find myself really looking forward to getting my hands in the soil! Doing something very physical and close to the Earth like that is always a great antidote both to any tendencies towards winter (and other) depression, as well as a great antidote to spending too much time in front of the computer. Sometimes it's good to just step away from the technology completely!
Although our property here is really larger and more work than we can reasonably handle, the garden area is one of the spaces that we're always staying on top of and not letting "go to seed." We have actually reclaimed a good bit of what originally was lawn because it just makes more sense to use the land to grow food, rather than to just have a flat piece of green grass.
That said, we're not as young as we once were... hate to admit it! And even though we are going to get a load of high grade topsoil delivered later this spring (for the soil conditioning project), we're going to have to take it quietly and slowly in order to not end up with injuries and bad backs.
I'm by no means so-called "prepper," I just like the flavor and freshness of homegrown over what you can get at the store which usually comes in on a truck from some other part of the world, and was picked a week or several weeks previously. Fresh definitely taste better!
I also really enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with successfully growing something. Gardening is perhaps one of the most tangible ways you can engage in a project and have visual confirmation that you are doing the right thing, and that you're accomplishing something.
I'm very grateful that we have this Garden space,. It was here when we bought the house but had become rather overgrown and very little had been done to actually improve the soil. It took me quite a lot of work to dig out the side of the garage because it had grown over with blackberry vines.
Building our dozen or so raised beds was also a huge amount of work, but it has definitely yielded some excellent results. Plus as we are aging, it also helps our backs that we don't have to tend and harvest everything at ground level, but instead from 16 inches above ground level.
Writing all this, and looking at the pictures again, makes me really look forward to gardening season and I'm almost able to forget about the cryptosphere taking another nose dive!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2024-01-24 00:41 PST
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