(Not “Candy Mountain”….) <crooked grin>

For the longest time I’ve been meaning to dig up a chunk of my front lawn/moss in order to have a garden patch. I had read the ground-breaking <wink!> book on permaculture farming by Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution ,  and had thought I ought to cover up the turf with straw and let is biodegrade w/o all of the labour of digging it up. Alas, it was one of those back-burner projects as I wondered how far I’d have to venture to find straw that wasn’t mixed heavily with seed/feed, etc, and then this past Saturday’s sunshine was as hot as summer and I Had To Do The Gardenwork Right Away! So I dragged out the shovel and enthusiastically began to dig out the sod. I’m going to have a huge patch of strawberries, I though happily. All the previous season’s plants had suckered themselves rampant like strawberries do and were crowded out in the flowerbeds. I’d dig them out and replant them in a front yard strawberry garden! A BIG strawberry Mountain! I thought wildly.

Alas….

Breaking sod under the bright sun was back-breaking labour. Mr. Fukuoka, I thought muchly humbled, I should have listened to you two months ago…. As I dug and dug, flipping over the chunks of turf to bash the soil out of the clumps, then tossing the grass-root remainders into large buckets, I came to the conclusions that:

1) I’m horribly out of shape. 2) Even though reading Mr. Fukuoka’s book annoyed me sometimes because some of his sayings reminded me a lot of my father and his tendency toward pronouncements while he sat at the kitchen table and my mother laboured over the cooking and I couldn’t help be triggered while reading about how one doesn’t need all this Stuff, and you can live simply in a rural farming setting and I was thinking: yah, but who does the LAUNDRY? I BET IT’S YOUR WIFE! I BET YOUR WIFE WANTED AN ELECTRIC WASHING MACHINE IN THE LITTLE HUT EVEN IF SHE WAS OKAY WITH THE FIREPIT COOKING! if I could get out of this sob-bursting, sod-busting labour, I would temporarily give up my feminist deconstruction and family baggage triggerpoints so that I could still have my large strawberry garden…. 3) The crows and starlings who come to rip up the yard must have been after those grodie fetal cutworms underneath the grass/moss. 4) My ambitions exceeded my capacity.

As I kept on eyeing the amount I had dug up and internally measuring it against my growing exhaustion, I began down-sizing my ambition. Maybe it doesn’t need to go as far as that peony plant. I can stop there, and curve it around, a smaller wedge….

There is something to be learned, here, about preparing and setting aside enough time to meet project goals…. But, yah. I wanted a one-day gardening project (there was still Easter dinner groceries to procure) and closure.

Strawberry Mountain is down-sized to Humbled Strawberry Patch! ^___^ .

Making turkey soup out of the bones. It’s raining, perfect timing for the transplanted plants! I got a rejection letter for a short story I sent to a magazine. Ahhh, well…. Rejection and dealing with rejection is an important part of this work. I quite like that story and will find it another home.

And onto more writing!