This Year's Gardens: Chapter 2

The zucchini at full speed

Oh my. What a difference ten days make. 

On the seed front, zukes and cukes are going great guns:

And the cucumbers are right there keeping pace with the zucchini! 

On the pepper front, the lowly little seeds I had dried from store-bought sweet peppers are starting to rear their tiny heads. I do not know what to expect from them as I am no doubt dealing with hybrids and who knows what this next generation will hold. But at least they are coming up! 

Who knows what they will produce, but at least they are growing! 

But my Leysas? The seeds I bought in search of a "truly" sweet pepper? Up until Wednesday, my answer was have been simple. Zilch, nada, rien. And then this one poked up, barely:

Look close in the upper right cell

Okay, maybe hope does spring eternal.

Outside, the weather has been March erratic. Warm days, then cold. Light frosts, then nothing, then light frosts again. All the same, and knowing that we are in Zone 6b (last frost date is mid-April), we are starting to do outdoor garden work. Warren suggested we till the kitchen garden and we did our first tilling today (Thursday).

It's electric. It's lightweight. It showed me who's boss.

Warren did the first pass. I raked the garden over, raking up the weeds the tiller had uprooted and then I did the second pass with the tiller.

Holy moly.

Talk about a wake-up call as to how far I have yet to go before I am capable of working consistently with our lightweight tiller. After about 30 minutes wrestling with it, I finally got enough of the hang of it that I could kinda sorta handle it.

As I started in on the garden work, I set my kitchen timer for an hour out of the gate. As I told Warren, until I build up my energy and my reserves, I need to watch my time. And I am glad I did; I was ready to gather up my tools when it went off.

We have ambitious plans to clean up, clear out, restore, and expand our two front beds, the back perennial bed, and the small bed that hugs the back side of our house. And of course there are the kitchen garden and the Hej garden to turn our efforts to for this year's vegetables.

Here's to more tilling! 

First tilling done! 

Update

I wrote this blog out by longhand Thursday night, while I sat at an evening rehearsal of the Mansfield Symphony. This morning, before I came upstairs to type this post, I took a look again at the sluggard Leysas and this is what I saw:

The second little head is in the lower left corner of the lower right cell. 

Two are now poking up their heads! 

Here's hoping.

Small Notes, Small Moments

Weaver Leather Supply: best smelling store ever. Ever.
(Photo from the store website.)

Monday Warren and I went out of town for Hyer Percussion matters that he absolutely needed to tend to. After starting my day getting my 2nd Covid-19 2024-2025 shot (I get two because I am so special), we took off in the car headed to the Millersburg area, which is known as the Heart of Amish Ohio. We were not there to sample Amish country, although it was all around us; we were there for the business matters.

During the day, we stopped at Keim Home Center in Charm, at which Warren found the sycamore board of his dreams (seriously); Keim was great but we went there only because I failed to catch the county road turnoff to Yoder Lumber after we had been to Weaver Leather Supply, which was our first stop of the day. 

Although it was a business trip and ended up taking longer than we had anticipated, in part because of missed turns, it was a great day. It was good for both of us to get out of town and away from the house and all of its demands. With a pen and paper, I captured a few notes about what we saw:

• A church sign at the Methodist church in Danville: "We stand tallest when we stoop to help one another." Be still, my heart.
• A yard with several blue, 5-gallon water jugs, upside down and firmly fixed to wood blocks, with holes cut large enough for the chickens that populated the yard to each have her own apartment. (Don't ask me about the rooster; I didn't see him.)
• Electric bikes being ridden everywhere by Amish women carting children, groceries, and such. Solar panels at Amish farms. 
• Passing several yards with small or large apiaries and my recognizing (from reading books on beekeeping) that the hives were still under their winter wraps. 
• I love draft horses and they are big (no pun intended) in Amish country because the farmers use them instead of tractors. I saw a team of four pulling a plow to turn the soil. My favorite was a team of two Belgians, harnessed to a large farm wagon, steadily pulling up to the stop sign on a side road and waiting for us to go by, their elderly owner sitting on the seat; the horses knew what they were doing.
• Having the best brown bag lunch ever maybe, which we ate in the parking lot of Weaver Leather. Of course, we took our own lunch. We had the best lunch ever because Sunday afternoon was a Symphony concert, and by the time it finished and Warren and friends got the timpani and other percussion instruments home, we were cold, hungry, and exhausted. A quick trip to City Barbeque solved that issue; we each saved half of our delicious Sunday night pulled pork sandwiches as the foundation of our Monday parking lot lunch. Great move.
• An Amish buggy parked in front of a Dollar General, quite possibly the only "general store/grocery" in the area, and an older woman, dressed properly in the long skirts and covering cloak, a kapp on her head, headed to the buggy with a full bag on her arm. [Note: Amish women drive buggies; they do not need a man to accompany them. We passed several with often two women chatting away as one drove.]

By the time we got home at 5:00, I was tired and my arm was sore, but the day was a huge business success. (In fact, this morning, Warren was on the phone with Pat Weaver of the aforementioned leather company, about a custom die they will be making for him after we all met yesterday and determined whether it would work.) We had a frozen pizza in the basement freezer, I made a quick salad, and that took care of our supper, which we ate while we both relaxed and talked over the day.

The trip was good as a getaway, and as an important step forward for Warren's business, but it was good for another reason. We are starting to plan a trip out to Portland/Vancouver this summer. When we got back home, I told Warren that I really loved spending the day out driving and doing, but I think the trip convinced me that driving cross-country, timing issues aside (because we have matters here in Delaware that we cannot just set aside for several weeks), is out of the question for me physically unless we stop a LOT. A WHOLE lot. Warren said he felt the same way about both of us. So we talked about starting to sketch out some date and start looking at flights. That was a hard realization, but I reminded myself that while I am about to turn 69 chronologically, 20 years of treatment plus that fun little episode in 2023 has aged me by at least a decade. (And those are doctors speaking, not April feeling sorry for herself.) 

It was a great day full of love, full of talk, full of being together. It doesn't get any better than that.

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 1

What my kitchen looked like Saturday

Hope springs eternal. At least when it comes to gardening.

It is mid-March and while it is still too early, even with climate change, to plant outside, my mind has turned to the coming year's potential. Warren has thoughts and ideas about our flower beds and the two front beds; my focus is on the possibilities in the vegetable arena. I have been making mental notes, looking at seed catalogs online, reviewing past years, and dreaming about this year's gardens.

So following through on my eternal hope, I just started seeds. Well, to be truthful, I started a lot of seeds. After last year's lackadaisical gardening performance due to my still recovering from the fall/winter medical messes, my just not being up to it, getting to my favorite go-to garden center, totally local and community-committed, for the garden (Miller's Country Gardens) way too late to get the good stuff, doing a mediocre job of even taking care of the garden—forget the weeds, I'm just talking about the plants, dealing with moving my dad into assisted living, and having the gardens WAY TOO CROWDED (again, always, even more so), I am set to make this year different and, I hope, better, 

I spent a chunk of Saturday starting SOME (SOME!!!) seeds inside. For the most part, I had stopped doing a lot of seed starting inside, other than zucchini, some years ago. So what was different about this year? A few reasons. One, there were some varieties I wanted to try that the likelihood of my finding them potted at Miller's or anywhere else was slim at best. I ordered a particular sweet pepper that caught my eye, and an heirloom zucchini and heirloom cucumber that had waved to me. (I had also saved some seeds from some sweet peppers that I'd bought at Aldi in the winter. Why not try them?)

The sweet peppers I am eager to try

The other key reason to starting them NOW, ignoring the timing issue with the last probable freeze date, is I am early enough that if the seedlings don't take off and thrive like they need to, Miller's opens April 7 and I will be a regular visitor as the spring opens up. Usually they bring out their "cold" plants out first, like broccoli, cabbage, and then their warm plants, the tomatoes and peppers, a few weeks later. I will get my tomatoes at Miller's because they are a pain to grow from seed at least for me. 

Zucchini-to-be, I hope! 

While I was dabbling in the dirt in the kitchen, Warren came in from the shop and expressed surprise. "I knew you were planning to do that soon, just not today." When I told him it takes 10+ days the seeds to sprout before I could see what I have to work with, then I can figure out what to do at Miller's, he understood immediately.

Warren and I will be tilling, spreading some compost, and tilling again in the next few weeks to get the vegetable beds ready. (Okay, we'll deal with some of the flower beds too. I love flowers, but they are not vegetables!) By late April, I hope to have some plants in the ground. (We're in Zone 6b here, so that is about the earliest that the USDA charts say to plant without fear of deadly frost.)

Hope springs eternal. So do gardens. 

I can already taste that first tomato! 

Time

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

16 years ago today, I penned my very first blog post. If I counted correctly, this will be my 926th post. 

925 posts behind me and 5844 days between that first March 17th and today. In those first early years, I was very prolific. After that, I seem to have hit a rhythm of 40-50 posts a year, except when I fell totally off the wagon and only posted 8 in 2021. (8? Eight? I still can't figure out 2021.)

A lot has happened in those 16 years: changes in employment, changes in family (Ramona! Lyrick! Orlando!), changes in health. Over these years. there have been losses along the way, most poignantly Aunt Ginger and dear Doug. 

Many other things have stayed the same. I am grateful beyond grateful that Warren and I still continue to share our lives and our home and our dreams. I continue to be very, very rich in friends.  I continue to give my heart to this community. 

If you had asked me back in 2009 when I first started writing if I thought I would even be alive in 2025, given my incurable myeloma, I would have been blunt: "No." (That answer would have based on what my body was doing, not what the statistics were. My longtime oncologist here, Tim, told me the very first time to ignore the statistics on life expectancy with myeloma and I always have.) 

But here I am after all. And here's to another year. Thanks for being with me for another trip around the sun! 

And Just Like That

After several days of going back and forth in my mind, I finally took the plunge,  deactivating my Facebook account and canceling my longstanding subscription to the New York Times on the same day.

And just like that, I felt better. 

Let me peel those two activities apart: Facebook first, then the Times.

My Facebook friends span the political spectrum from way left to way right. I have not unfriended any folks for their voting choices. Ever. Period. For the record, I have very close friends and family, near and dear to my heart, who vote very differently from me. They are not the reason I deactivated my Facebook page. 

I deactivated my Facebook page because of the friends with whom I share many similar political views (liberal, to say the least). I know how I feel about the current administration. I strongly feel our nation and our democracy is at risk, and, at a personal level, that my family members and I are at risk. That being said, I don't need to be shrieked out several times a day with posts about what the Orangeman said, what his administration is doing, and how outraged I should feel. I am beyond tired of living in an echo chamber. 

And just like that, I was out of the echo chamber. 

Stepping away from the New York Times was a different decision involving a lot of moving parts. One, Warren had stopped reading it much at all months ago because of overloads on his personal time; he had (still does) more pressing matters to deal with. Looking back, I realized I had pared way way way back on how much I read it. So neither of us were getting much out of it. Two, there were the recent editorial losses: longtime columnist Paul Krugman left because the management was leaning on him heavily with edits he could not tolerate; Charles Blow left to take a prestigious fellowship at Harvard but also because of management leaning on him; Peter Coy (my favorite economist ever) left saying he was "retiring" but I wonder if it was more than that. Three, yes the overload. The overload the  overload the overload. Four, the cost. If we were reading it more regularly, I wouldn't look hard at that cost, but for not reading it, yeah, it's a tad pricey. I was paying $25.00 every four weeks, or $325.00 a year. That's way more than a lot for a subscription we were not using. (Interesting now that I have canceled, when I do open it while our current paid subscription time runs, they are offering me a full subscription at $1.00/week.) So I canceled my subscription.

And just like that, I didn't have to keep up with the newspaper anymore.

I let Ben and Alix know about both decisions.  (Sam eschews social media, so he is not worrying about whether his mom is on Facebook.) Because of Alix's job, he has to follow the national press, but he totally got my reasoning.  Ben's response was even more direct:  "The media cycle is overwhelming and all the outrage in the world isn't getting anything done." 

That comment about outrage not getting anything done struck home. Where I can make a difference is here locally, which is why I posted a photo of a slow food cooker at the start of this blog. Yes, the hot sandwiches to go program at the Justice Bus is running well. We just repeated it for our March Bus. My next door neighbors have started supplying the Bus with fresh-baked (as in "just this morning") sourdough loaves. Trust me, warm food, a loaf of bread, and welcoming our clients are all needed right here, right now. So when I arrived to set up for the Bus Thursday, I posted this sign:

And this one:

And just like that, we were off and running. 

We do not ask clients their political views before assisting them; hard times do not care about your voting pattern. As a long-ago, long-deceased friend reminded me back in the late 1970s (a lifetime ago) when we discussed activism, "April, it's hard to show up for a rally or a protest meeting when you are working two jobs and trying to keep a roof over your head." I feel that neither major party cares about poverty—food insecurity, hunger, housing insecurity, homelessness, medical care—because at the top, they do not have to worry about doing without. (Who do I agree with most of this topic? Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted and Poverty, By America. Here is a very recent appearance by Desmond on the Daily Show talking about poverty and our abysmal record in this nation: just watch it.)

From time to time, I will still check in on Facebook because there are a few family members I only see photos of on Facebook. It amuses me that the only person who has contacted me about not being on Facebook is a cousin whose minster's wife (a high school classmate of mine) reached out to her to make sure I was okay because she was thinking of me and couldn't find me. (For the record, my cousin and our mutual connection do not share my political views.) That just reinforced my thoughts about the echo chamber: if all one does is screech, one does not see the community. So I emailed my cousin an update and told her to share my note with our friend.

And just like that, I went on with my day.

"You Are Enough"

The frozen lake

A long-sleeved tee was in the gift shop in Eisenberg Building at Mayo Clinic. Across its front were the words "You are enough." When I walked past it this past Monday, I told Warren I needed to tell myself that more regularly: "April, you are enough."

We returned home Wednesday evening from a trip to my Emerald City (Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota). We left last Friday to visit Ann and David, now very close friends, in northern Wisconsin, made our way to Oz for two days, then on to Milwaukee, where Warren had an instrument to deliver to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. I wrote some of this post Sunday evening, some more on Monday evening, and am now getting around to finishing it today.

The time in northern Wisconsin was stunning, incredible, amazing. We went there on a heartfelt invitation from a retired symphony Executive Director to Warren on his retirement. The visit was two days of wonderful food, laughter, tears, deep conversations on music, life, language, and implicit bias, a walk across a frozen lake, sharing books, family stories, and more. It was one of the very best times we have ever spent with another couple. It was with heartfelt hugs we said our thanks and drove away Sunday midday to Rochester.

By the time we arrived in Rochester late in the afternoon, I was spent. Warren and I had stubbed our emotional toes as we began the trek, a verbal miscue resulting in a long silent trip with mixed emotions hanging heavy in the air. When we got into our hotel room and after eating supper quietly, we were ready to begin to get back on the same page. As we talked, I surprised myself by saying, slowly, "And I may be dealing with a little depression."

My brilliant therapist Doug, now from over two decades ago, and I talked about depression and that I occasionally experienced what he diagnosed as "situational depression" (as compared to an Axis 1 major depression). He felt strongly that I knew when it happened, what it felt like, and how to first cope and then move beyond it. 

So why now? I thought about that Sunday evening and on into the week. I can toss up several thoughts: the geographical distance of my family and concerns about their personal safety in this country, growing responsibility for my aging father, the screeds in social media (so much so that I am leaning towards deactivating my Facebook account; I don't need to be yelled at about the current administration; trust me, I know): all that and more. 

But without ignoring any of those concerns, I need to move forward, focusing on where I am able to help mend the broken world in my immediate community and family. As the Talmud reminds me, it is not my responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but I am not free to desist from that work either. (From Pirkei Avot.) Taking those words apart and applying them to my feelings, just because I am not able to fix the broken world, I need not dismiss my efforts and work in my sphere, in my life.

As I finish typing this in Friday morning, my mood has shifted as I look into what is ahead of me in the next few months, from legal clinics (the hot sandwiches to go at February's Justice Bus were a hit and I will be repeating that this coming March) to family matters to Warren's brilliant work to this year's garden. (And for those of you who are wondering, the medical front continues to be steady as she goes, to the great delight of all.)

A Hyer Percussion Products; note the university logo on the end piece!

So, back to where this started. "You are enough." I don't need a shirt to remind myself that. And, as Doug worked with me on so many years ago, I have the capacity to deal with whatever this is. I am enough.  

A Wednesday Win

This post is for Amanda, who will totally get it and burst out laughing.

We are slated to have some snow/ice roll in later today. The city trucks have been out brining the streets and I wanted to make sure I got a long walk in just in case everything iced up. So I bundled up and took off for the CVS on the south side of town; I had some perks expiring soon (some today) and wanted to use them.

This is what I bought at CVS:

Total cost? $0.00.

But wait, there's more!

Amanda and I both follow Katy Wolk-Stanley, The Non-Consumer Advocate, on Instagram. (I also read Katy's blog, which is often downright hilarious.) Each year, Katy saves all of her "found money" and then lets us know how much she netted for the year. "Found money" is exactly that: a coin dropped that you find and pick up on a parking lot, for example. (I include non-profit mailings where the organization attaches a dime or a nickel to convince you to donate.) With fewer and fewer people using cash, found money is scarcer with each passing month. But I told Amanda I was game if she was game. 

So imagine my delight when, on leaving CVS and preparing to walk back home (1.3 miles each way, in case anyone is wondering), I look down and see this:

Found money! 

Free dish soap, free note cards (yes, I write a lot of letters every month), and a penny for my 2025 found money bowl. 

That's a win no matter how you count it.