Numbers Around Town
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- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Food for the Body | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Gardening | Meditation
State of the Garden (and Samtulana)
The grapes are not nearly as bountiful as last year. The first 90F week was too early and sudden, which blasted dozens of newly formed grapes. And then it was too wet and cool. The few figs dried before ripening. But it was a great spring for kale and chard, and the cherry tomatoes are pretty happy. That the weather makes some things happier and some less happy is a tangible reminder why mono-cultures are so risky a venture. One of the greatest gifts I get from the “failures” in my edible garden is gratitude. I am reminded of how fortunate I am that the only repercussions of something not growing or producing well is that I have to buy more produce at the farm market or the grocery store.
The rains and now the heat are wondrous lovely for the mosquitoes. Here’s me dressing for a morning’s work in the garden. You might laugh, but I only got two bites in over three hours in the garden, which included watering. It likely would have been at least a dozen in loose trousers or shorts and a t-shirt. This is also the outfit of choice when hiking in the woods filled with deer and mice and lyme-disease bearing ticks.
I picked the marigolds yesterday to put on the altar. The puja card of the day was “balance” or “samtulana.” It was a perfect concept to meditate on for the day because little brings me back into balance better than spending a few hours gardening, and I’ve been feeling off-kilter.
Uma, of course, was there to lend moral support.
The “before” picture gives some idea of how simultaneously overgrown from the rains and heat-blasted from the past week everything was.
The “after” picture doesn’t reflect as much as I would like how much of a difference three and a half hours of weeding, deadheading, clipping, rearranging, harvesting, feeding, and watering made. When I got hungry, I just picked sun-warmed, just ripened grapes and then got back to work. Lunch, of course, emphasized contributions from the garden.
Coincidence or Correlation (and Overnight Cinnamon Apple Oatmeal)
On my way to and from work, I watched the buds and blooms–some brown, some bravely hanging on, some withering around the edges and starting to wilt; the cherries–mostly in bud or just starting to open–that haven’t fully blasted yet, will do so by the end of the cold period following the storm.
I’ve seen years when the cherry blossoms were torn from the trees at their lushest by a violent storm coming through with a cold front and and years when a spring snow added to the blossoms and years when the blossoms were well before or after the parade. I haven’t seen a year in my over 30 years here, where the blossoms just died from a weirdly early false spring followed by a winter storm with bitter cold. I am sure it is just coincidence and not correlation that this sorry withering of the loveliest part of Washington spring happened this at this particular time.
In the meantime, I am certain that I will need to go out first thing in the morning to shovel and then will need to turn on my computer and go to work. I’m sure I will find the snow (when I am not thinking about the impact on flowering and fruiting perennials), even the shoveling, invigorating and somewhat enjoyable. To provide nourishment that takes into account the extra exercise and how the shoveling time will impact my usual morning routine, tonight after washing up, I put up overnight apple oatmeal. Into the slow cooker went a couple of diced apples, a handful of raisins, steel cut oats, cinnamon, a bit of butter, and a dash of salt. When I wake up, It will smell something like apple crisp, and it will be just the thing to fuel snow shoveling. With the extra, I will make muffins for later in the week.
