Monday, 8 April 2024
at home
Faerie enjoys being a little bully to Zinc, pinning her down and making her cry, and when Faerie does this, she puffs up her normally skinny and unimpressive tail.
After causing trouble, she slept the hours away.
On this rainy day, I read an enjoyable memoir/how-to gardening book by a British gardener with whom I felt I had much in common, including gardening while experiencing physical difficulties. The Timberland Regional Library system has it.
This is familiar to me: “I may have started managing my expectations, but still had a long way to go to manage my imagination of how long any one task might take.
Mr J can be seen to raise an eyebrow when I say ‘can we just …?’ or ‘it’ll only take half an hour’.
In my mind’s eye the jobs are almost completed by the time I have asked for his help; it’s funny how the reality never quite seems to match up to the speed of completion in my imagination.”
I also relate to her collecting all sorts of ingredients for her garden projects but having to learn to turn things down. “We also found pallets being thrown away and other lengths of wood, a couple of water butts and patio slabs and a host of other useful bits and pieces. It wasn’t long before people were offering us all kinds of ‘stuff’ that they no longer needed. And because I felt awkward about saying no to their kindness, we then had piles of junk here and it became our responsibility to recycle or dispose of it. It has taken me a long time to learn to say ‘no thank you’, but it’s a valuable tool. There’s a fine line between having useful resources to hand and a junk pile.” And yet I don’t want people to stop offering me their discards! I particularly need some more pallets for repairing the compost bins.
Robert and I had the same habits, and when Allan and I moved from the home where I had lived with Robert for 9 years, and then alone for two years and then with Allan for five, the amount of once thought to be useful ingredients that we hauled to the dump came to five full loads in our work trailer.
The story of how Liz and Mr J managed to live quite inexpensively (which would have been much harder here because of what USA residents have to pay for health insurance!) was similar to ours, especially since, at the start of the pandemic, we stopped dining out: “There are other purchases that we no longer make, now that we work at or close to home; things like food on the go, coffee shop drinks and snacks, lunches in cafés or restaurants have all disappeared from our lives.” …. “Looking back, I am shocked at the amount of money we used to spend on tea, coffee and snacks. It’s a significant saving that we continue to make on a daily basis.” It is astonishing how much giving up dining out (and not getting drive through coffee drinks) added to my available plant budget. And I think Allan always preferred to be more frugal. I thought I would miss dining out, but I mostly don’t miss it. There was a warmth about it and a feeling of lavishness and privilege that felt pleasant, and, of course, the food was often delicious. The downsides were the great cost and the reading and gardening time missed. I often felt that I was ending gardening evenings way too soon when we went out for dinner in summer.
Liz and Mr J also, like us, “don’t take holidays. Choosing to tighten our belts, in terms of day to day spending, is one thing; choosing a lifestyle that means you may not be able to go away overnight is another and it’s a choice that we made almost without thinking about it.” Because of her health issues, she found travel especially exhausting anyway, and…I can’t even imagine negotiating travel with a vertiginous brain and schlepping a rollator around.
I appreciated knowing that someone else gets panicky about the garden in spring. I thought it was work-related for me…how to find time for my own garden. Maybe it’s because this is the first year without at least one huge job, but I am still feeling it. The “inner panic happened all the same. It was not a fleeting thought that flickered through my head, but a deep-seated panic that, over the course of a month or so, pushed its way to the surface and made me grumpy, snappy and, I suspect, rather unpleasant to live with.
The spring of the fourth year …. I hit a wall of doubt and as I write at the start of our fifth growing season, I have once again had a month of feeling panic-stricken and doubting in my abilities and the garden’s capacity.
By late May, I start wondering what all the fuss was about as the garden starts to fill with growth and it becomes easy to see the abundance unfolding in front of us.” Her anxiety was increased by their plan to grow much of their own food, a pressure that I haven’t added although I do more food growing than I used to. I am deeply impressed with the amount she managed to grow.
Her book is delightful. I recommend it, and I wish I was her neighbour.
The author makes popular YouTube gardening videos and has done so for years, and she shares with us her favourites. Her own channel is Byther Farm.
My favourites are John Lord’s Secret Garden and one that I recently discovered, Whispers in the Garden.
I read Liz Zorab’s book in one happy sitting. I will acquire and read her other books. In the evening, I started a novel, by the Swedish author of A Man Called Ove, about which I will share some thoughts tomorrow.
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