Body/Garden
Apr. 26th, 2026 04:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI made it outside yesterday. I have to, to walk Solly, and during our second walk we wandered into the shade at Avallu's point and sat there where he always used to. She was very happy to curl up next to me with her head on my lap sometimes or in guard position others.
A couple days ago (?) I'd visited someone* I knew through the pottery studio. She had got her own kiln and stopped coming in, but she owns the florist in town and now sells her work through there. She's added bigger pieces to her repertoire and refined her mug forms and it's neat to see.
Anyhow, I stopped in to the store, chatted a bit, looked at her work, and also asked if she had spare cardboard because the rumour mill had mentioned she might. Well! I came home with a ton of cardboard and some bubble wrap and that foamy sheet stuff. She was grateful to be rid of it and I was grateful to have it, I guess she needs to spend $100/month to get rid of it otherwise.
I use a lot of cardboard to mulch berry shrubs and to lasagne bed new beds. In fact, lack of cardboard stops me from doing a lot. This huge batch of it, in very useful huge pieces maybe 3' x 5', removes a significant bottleneck for me.
And packaging material means I can send mugs to people and all I need is the right sized box, I don't need to either store up amazon packaging for months, pillage the newspaper recycling in the mailbox and crumple it all up, or buy like $4 worth of filler in addition to the extremely high cost of mailing from here.
The packaging material is still in the back of my truck, but the cardboard is all staged. Last summer I hired a neighbour to burn the tops of aspens I'd had cut down along my fenceline and hadn't been able to deal with. There were a ton of aspen suckers, which I slowly picked away at. Last fall I ran a row of perennial beds, slightly raised, made with the trunks of those aspens and cardboard along
(shoot, that's about as much coherence as I can easily do in one writing. It's the reaching back and trying to order/correlate events, put causality on them, remember details, that's what runs my brain into a wall)
anyhow, I made a strip of beds parallel to the fence for peonies, and now I'm making another strip of beds, slightly terraced down the slope and closer to the fence, in which I will put hazel and oak and some taller decuduous trees to help screen the yard (elm, hackberry, and ash probably). YEsterday I (slowly) put down six pieces of cardboat and moved two logs in the space of maybe an hour and a half.
In the evening, after lots of rest, I planted my peas after bending some concrete reinforcing wire in half the long way to make a trellis (I did this with my feet and was pleased with the result).
So: lots lots lots of gardening relatively, and I'm happier today. Happy because distracted from my overall situation, and because I'm embedded in the immediate world instead of thinking about dedicating half my life to doing paperwork that, as above, stops my brain but I need to just keep doing it liek reaching my hand into the fire over and over for months on end.
Anyhow. IT was good. NAvigating staiirs is hard again today, I'm writing this in part because I'm waiting to be able to get up out of bed to go and pee before going back to sleep. The things you take for granted, riight?
*I visited her in her shop, which made it easy to leave when someone else came in
A couple days ago (?) I'd visited someone* I knew through the pottery studio. She had got her own kiln and stopped coming in, but she owns the florist in town and now sells her work through there. She's added bigger pieces to her repertoire and refined her mug forms and it's neat to see.
Anyhow, I stopped in to the store, chatted a bit, looked at her work, and also asked if she had spare cardboard because the rumour mill had mentioned she might. Well! I came home with a ton of cardboard and some bubble wrap and that foamy sheet stuff. She was grateful to be rid of it and I was grateful to have it, I guess she needs to spend $100/month to get rid of it otherwise.
I use a lot of cardboard to mulch berry shrubs and to lasagne bed new beds. In fact, lack of cardboard stops me from doing a lot. This huge batch of it, in very useful huge pieces maybe 3' x 5', removes a significant bottleneck for me.
And packaging material means I can send mugs to people and all I need is the right sized box, I don't need to either store up amazon packaging for months, pillage the newspaper recycling in the mailbox and crumple it all up, or buy like $4 worth of filler in addition to the extremely high cost of mailing from here.
The packaging material is still in the back of my truck, but the cardboard is all staged. Last summer I hired a neighbour to burn the tops of aspens I'd had cut down along my fenceline and hadn't been able to deal with. There were a ton of aspen suckers, which I slowly picked away at. Last fall I ran a row of perennial beds, slightly raised, made with the trunks of those aspens and cardboard along
(shoot, that's about as much coherence as I can easily do in one writing. It's the reaching back and trying to order/correlate events, put causality on them, remember details, that's what runs my brain into a wall)
anyhow, I made a strip of beds parallel to the fence for peonies, and now I'm making another strip of beds, slightly terraced down the slope and closer to the fence, in which I will put hazel and oak and some taller decuduous trees to help screen the yard (elm, hackberry, and ash probably). YEsterday I (slowly) put down six pieces of cardboat and moved two logs in the space of maybe an hour and a half.
In the evening, after lots of rest, I planted my peas after bending some concrete reinforcing wire in half the long way to make a trellis (I did this with my feet and was pleased with the result).
So: lots lots lots of gardening relatively, and I'm happier today. Happy because distracted from my overall situation, and because I'm embedded in the immediate world instead of thinking about dedicating half my life to doing paperwork that, as above, stops my brain but I need to just keep doing it liek reaching my hand into the fire over and over for months on end.
Anyhow. IT was good. NAvigating staiirs is hard again today, I'm writing this in part because I'm waiting to be able to get up out of bed to go and pee before going back to sleep. The things you take for granted, riight?
*I visited her in her shop, which made it easy to leave when someone else came in
