Three Bags a Day

I've been struggling a bit about what to include in this blog. The reality is, I live a pretty little life, and I can only pontificate so much about pop culture and current events. Mostly, my life revolves around family and home environment, with a few voyageuristic forays into the wider world of travel and diving.

So, close to home: Fall, this year, has been bereft of much travel, and unseasonably wet. We were on the receiving end of the last hurrah of some eastern pacific tropical storm that dumped boatloads of water on us for days on end. The heavy dark clouds that stall when they bump up against the mountains create an oppressive atmosphere of perma-dusk. It ain't easy being green - all the lushness of our temperate rain forest comes from these regular deluges of rain. Living literally on the edge of the forest, we get some smoly hokes rainstorms here.

Heavy rain for a gardener like me makes a Fall cleanup a mucky, procrastinated chore. My habit has historically been to try to stay on top of the garden from (glorious) early spring to late summer. When it starts to fade, in the past, I have lost interest, and let it revert to decadent jungle until I cut it all back and rake it out in late Winter, and then lay on my secret recipe mushroom manure/peat moss mix to give it a jump start in early Spring.

This year I am trying something different. Inspired by some of the lovely gardens I have been visiting while traveling in other cities, I am cutting back the perennials and pruning the shrubs and getting rid of infestions of chickweed and morning glory before they can settle in for the winter. So far I've bagged twenty-five or so garden recycling brown bags of detritous, and it ain't over yet.

I've discovered that there is something cathartic in cleaning up a garden and putting it to bed for the winter. Even though no one will be out there enjoying it, it will look better from the windows and entries, and a good pruning now will help the shrubs stay as compact as possible for any snow loads it may suffer.

We are planning to renovate a corner of our large garden in the Spring, so this winter I'll work on the design and the plan for those garden changes, and then in Spring I will have the time to move plants, shrubs and trees. I love landscaping - compared to house renovations, much less stressful and so much more bang for the buck.

Three bags a day (when the weather allows me out there) has been my goal for this Fall. The bending, stretching, kneeling, lifting, carting is keeping me strong and out of the weight room.

It's all dirty, but good.