The Only True Constant

When I was in college, I took a conceptual physics class.  It was required.  I did not do so voluntarily although I was relieved to learn that there was not a lot of math involved.  I do love science.  Physics is just a bit of a reach for me.  Many days and nights were spent sitting in a coffee shop with my husband trying to bend our brains around the latest thought experiment.  But, I remember the one thing that my professor jammed into my resistant mind:

There are these things that are considered mathematical constants.   We talked about the speed of light ad nauseum.  However, the only real constant in the universe is change.  The irony of that resonated with me then.  It still does today.

Look at those carrots!

I've changed jobs again.  This may come as no surprise to most.  In the beginning, the work at the sand mine was interesting and challenging. After a few months, it became unfulfilling, repetitive, and depressing.  The people there were, and presumably still are, unhappy and unmotivated and singularly unkind to one another.  It isn't the place for me.  I gave it eight months.  The final straw came when I nearly suffered frostbite one very cold December day working in the load out bay.  Think about that for a minute:  I nearly got frostbite for fracking sand.  

Enough is enough.

Sunrise at the sand mine...might have been sunset.  I can't remember now...

Now I've taken a job at a meat processing facility for a rather large company.  We make ready-to-eat foods.  My job is in Food Safety and Quality Assurance.  I monitor for environmental issues.  I perform equipment inspections.  I do GMP audits.  It is my job to monitor the food we produce and help to ensure it is safe from contaminants. There are those who would argue that the 'food' we make is not something that people ought to eat on a regular basis.  I will agree without hesitation that hot dogs and frozen pizza are not exactly prime cuisine.  But, the fact remains that people feed this stuff to their kids.  They should at least be able to do so without worrying that it might infect them with something awful. 

Look at that dinker!

Fundamentally, my work is satisfying in that I feel I am performing a function that society as a whole needs.  Ensuring the safety of the food web is an important component of feeding the general population any way you look at it.  In a perfect world, everyone would eat wholesome food that is locally grown and very fresh...they would know the face and the name of the person who grew it.  In the real world, people eat what they like and can afford.  For many it is hot dogs and frozen pizza.

The work that I do for money has strengthened my resolve to continue the other work that I do: raising lean rabbit meat, growing organic vegetables, and producing handmade bath items for the whole family.  I am stepping back into the role of entrepreneur and stocking up on fresh batches of soap.

One of my seasonal soaps called Mother's Day.  It has a floral bouquet fragrance.

All of this has lead me more or less full circle back to where I know I need to be.  The constant of change has lead me to learn that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I don't know who made this meme.  But, I love it.

It all comes down to balance.  Balance is the thing I've been searching and striving to find for years.  Maybe some day, I'll get it right.  Until then, I'll be gardening.

They Have To Eat, Too

This is just a nice volunteer sunflower.  Nothing to do with the post, really.

Last night while sitting eating my 'lunch' at what I've come to regard as my night and day job, I was thinking about what to plant as my fall crop this year.  I don't have a lot of luck with fall crops.  Either I plant too late or it gets too dry or the frost comes too soon or not soon enough.  But I was reading about growing carrots as a fall crop, so I decided to give that go.  I haven't tried that yet.  As a bonus, I happen to have leftover carrot seeds.

So, I'm out in my garden in back of my house digging up what is left of the carrots I planted last spring. I planted a rather long variety and I've pulled a few that were well over 10 inches long. They are some very nice carrots. I had to literally dig some of them out of the ground lest they break off and cause the prolific swearing and subsequent stabbing of the earth with my little garden trowel in frustration.

What can I say?  The sweat was in my eyes.

So I get the last carrot pulled finally!  I'm sitting on the edge of the bed breaking off the carrot greens and dropping them on the bed for mulch when some movement catches the corner of my eye. I look more closely. To my surprise, and horror, here is a baby bunny digging its way up out of the soil.

Gulp.

Right where I was digging mere moments before. Right where I could have ended his hippity-hoppity life with my little garden trowel.

Double gulp.

I decided to poke around a little, with my hands this time, because you KNOW baby bunnies don't come in singles.  I promptly unearth three more.*

That's when I threw up in my mouth a little and eased the wanderer back into the nest with his siblings before I could find any more or any potential carnage.

Now I know what you're thinking. Why am I not freaking out about a cottontail nest in the middle of my carrot patch?

It's the irony. It seems so appropriate to find rabbits in a carrot patch that I can't complain at all. After all, who of my generation can forget the Saturday morning images of Bugs Bunny tunneling under a carrot farm and popping up in a carotene-induced stupor wondering if he should have turned left at Albuquerque?

I expect Momma Cottontail will move those babes lickety split in the night once she realizes they've been found.**

Unlike some gardeners, I don't mind sharing some of my bounty with the wildlife. I don't like that the birds ate so many of my apples. But in a few years, I'll have more apples than I know what to do with.  It's part of the web of life. Besides, they don't understand our arbitrary boundaries.

Not to mention the fact that they have to eat, too. 

*I took my husband out to view the tiny dinkers and we found a fifth bunny.  All carrot replanting operations are on hold for the moment.

**Update 31 July 2016:  Nope.  They're still there.  And we have a wicked rain storm approaching.  Why am I worried about them?  Yes.  I covered them up with some discarded carrot tops.  Hopeless.  I am hopeless.

The Next Great Thing

I went shopping yesterday for dog food.  The least expensive place I've found to get the kind my dogs like is the home store.  So that's where I go.  I figured it would be safe.  Surely the garden center is still closed.  Nothing there to tempt me this time of year.

*insert sardonic laugh here*

I should have known better.  I walked in the door, confident in my purpose.  I grabbed a cart and headed towards the pet aisle.  But, wait.  What's this over here?  IT CAN'T BE!

Seed display.

*facepalm*

I know for a FACT that they just took that seed display down right before Thanksgiving.  I know because I stood before it for ages before I decided that I would wait for fresh seed in the spring.  And I wanted to check out the seed catalogs and not just buy the first seed I see in the spring.

*insert hysterical laughter here*

Yeah.  Right. I stood there before the neatly organized packets and just sort of took it all in.

A store employee came up to me and said, "You can't start a garden this time of year."  I looked at his teasing smile and asked why they put the display up already.  "Because people will buy them already."  He shrugged and walked away.

The good news is that they had almost all the seeds I wanted except for the Rutgers tomatoes that I've come to depend on every year.  And they were all on special.  Yes, I checked the date on the packets and they're for this year.  So I can only assume they are somehow 'factory seconds' from Burpee.  Maybe.

But that's not the subject of this blog.  I was wandering around juggling seed packets and waffling about tomatoes when I noticed that they also had some of the seed starting materials out already.  After last year's fiasco with the greenhouse and inconsistent watering woes, I was up for something new.  This is what I found.

That's right.  A self-watering seed starting contraption.  I was consumed with joy.

Yep, Burpee got another $11 from me for that baby.  I'm pretty sure I could come up with something cheaper and greener if I spent some time perusing youtube and googling around.  But here it was right in my face and me with fresh seed and growing on my mind.

I'm such a sucker.  An optimistic sucker.  As soon as I can find my camera charger, I'll take some pics of this contraption as I set it up.  I've got a couple months before I ought to even think about starting seed.  Fortunately, I'll be ready.

*rubbing hands briskly together and cackling madly with glee*

Weekends

If you need me, I'll be in the garden.

Ah! The Weekend.  I see it in my head that way with capitol letters.

It's pretty glorious: Two whole days of not driving for 3 hours a day and not spending 8.5 hours struggling and raging against the machine. My garden beckons and my dogs pounce and bounce with delight when, on Saturday morning, I emerge from my bedroom and dig out a couple scoops of dog chow and start the coffee pot with my current favorite weekend brew.

Of course, there are the usual chores and all those things I have to do to keep things moving as smoothly as possible.  It is really nice to have a couple days that I am not expected anywhere in particular nor do I have to complete anything under a deadline.  The time is more or less all mine and that in itself is relaxing.


But for me, the real quality time happens in the evenings on the weekends.  The pretty much self-imposed demands of the day have been met...or ignored and I'm free to enjoy some time just enjoying my life.

The picture above is the garden we started building this spring as it looks in the early evening hours this time of year.  This garden space along with the covered patio you can't really see in the picture takes up about one third of the space in what serves as our back yard. The neighbor's house and tree gives us some much-welcomed shade along about five or six o'clock We were a little worried that there wouldn't be enough sun to grow tomatoes.

As if.  Apparently there was no cause for alarm as we have tons of little green tomatoes coming on.  I know I keep mentioning the little green tomatoes but I can't help it.  Last fall was a long time ago.

The shed in the back was there when we bought the house. The little herb garden that you can almost see in the upper left area was put in last year as an experiment.  But everything else is new this year. I am ecstatic about these developments and have so many more things planned for the next few years. This year, we're hoping to get a couple more beds put in and some more fence work done.

Oops! Time for my Saturday afternoon lounge around the garden.  I'd better get my iced tea and head out!  I'm taking my tomato basket just in case.

Have a good one!

What am I doing here anyway?

My very first grown-from-seed eggplants!

That's a good question, actually. What's a girl like me who has spent the last 30 years of her life living and working in a midwestern city of more than 200,000 people doing in a farm town of less than 1000 people? Well, I'll tell you.

When I was a little girl, I wanted my grandpa's farm. I wanted to grow things both flora and fauna. It was a dream that I did not dare share with anyone. Ever. Or at least I didn't until I met my current husband.

Now that I am most definitely not a little girl anymore and after spending much of my adult life on the treadmill of corporate America, I find I still want to grow and nurture living things. Moreso now than ever before. Working for a massive corporation has been financially profitable for me but after a while, it has started to drain the life from me. Money, as they say, is not everything.

After much soul-searching, I figured out that I don't really want a farm. At least, not how farms are defined these days. I wanted to find an acreage and I almost did.

We have a small lot that is about 75 feet square situated roughly in the geographical center of our tiny town. A lot of the space is taken up with house and garage and dog kennel (which is another post entirely). The remainder of the lot is slowly being transformed into garden space.

The bulk of this blog will be taken up by our attempts to learn and streamline our personal food production in very small spaces. Here, where we are surrounded by people with two, three or even four city lots to their name, and in spite of the economic climate we will work with a piece of land only half the size of a single lot. It's a challenge to be sure, but it's also a place to start.

I can't wait to get started!