Gardening and other Diversions

Every Wednesday at seven o’clock in the evening several of us get together for meditation at the Oakdene Centre.  This wasn’t a practice that I had in my “Before Bear River” life so I’m truly a baby beginner.  The trouble was last night I kept falling asleep which is not what you should do. Ideally, meditation brings you to a higher level of awareness and my awareness was telling me loud and clear that I was dead tired. Why?

Beautiful, wild lupines were ploughed under to create garden space.

Could it be because yesterday was day three of turning the vegetable garden by hand?

The ground had been plowed and disced.  A year ago I didn’t even know what this meant. The tractor drags a bar with sharp huge metal disks that cut into the sod and break up long stringy roots of invasive weeds as well as clods of earth.

The previous day's rain made turning the earth so easy.

As laid-back as Bear River seems on the surface, what with meditation and perfect scenery and friendly folks and pot luck dinners; people like me can’t help but bring all their past baggage with them — so when I heard that Pamela and Erin who are “ real gardeners” were turning their vegetable gardens by hand I knew I had to do this too.  After all aren’t I aspiring to be a real gardener too?

No problem! I can do this!  After all I have a brand-new fork from Lee Valley and I have several generations of gardening running through my veins.

By day three the soil had dried out a lot.

Well it all sounds so romantic and idyllic this back-to-the-land-stuff but it’s a lot of hard work and I have to confess I’m not really used to a lot of hard physical work and my reality is bumping up against my vision of who I think I want to be.

After the tractor goes home there are still clumps of weeds to pull out of the vegetable patch. Oh and did I mention wheel barrels of stones to collect? And let’s not forget the black flies that are out in full force!  So I don my bug shirt that I bought last year – the one that covers my face with mesh and traps the stray black flies inside with me.

Rock picking is part of the Bear River gardening experience.

The more I dig, the hotter the sun gets and the bigger the garden looks. Thankfully there are all kinds of wonderful distractions… people come by to visit me.  I notice there are beautiful wild lupine’s growing and I have to go over and look at  them. I decide that all the rocks I’m picking out of the garden would make for a great mini waterfall feature in the unfinished, empty, future pond and that’s what I should be focusing on.  I remember being told that if I shove a piece of willow tree in wet ground that it will grow in the tree so I stop to do that. 

The drooping branch in the middle of the photo may actually root and grow a willow tree.

I go and check on Larry and his helper in the house who are now stripping the floors.  When I see what backbreaking work it  is to drag those heavy floor sanders around, I head back out to my patch of future garden.

The floors look AMAZING, but the sanding is brutal work.

When I get back to my garden patch,  I’m really surprised to see that it’s still in the same condition that it was when I left it.  This whole gardening exercise is a great study in persistence for me.  Yesterday, day three, I had almost completed turning one third of it and as a reward to myself I planted some seeds into the earth I had turned.  That part is so very easy compared to digging and turning!

Who can concentrate on digging when there are gorgeous Lupines everywhere?

 In spite of my slowness I thought I was doing okay until I went over to visit Erin’s garden which is also her first garden in Bear River..  Not only did she hand turn everything, but plants are actually growing out of it and her garden is double the size of mine.  I am working on my severe garden envy.   I am also plea-bargaining with myself to skip hand-turning all the spaces in between the plants. I’m also listening to podcasts that extol the virtues of eating organic food to inspire me and to push me along.

Even the buttercups are a beautiful distraction.

In the last month I’ve noticed that some of our gardeners have dropped away from coming to meditation.  They said it was a busy time of year but now I suspect that the real reason is they didn’t want to be caught falling asleep.

In the meantime, if you’re hankering for a authentic Bear River organic gardening experience, come on over.  I have an extra garden fork but you’ll have to bring your own bug jacket.

Late in the day and much to do.