It's not done, but it's more done than it was a couple of weeks ago. For days on end I woke up, went to the garden, dug dirt, then went home. Occasionally I bathed.
The community garden I'm a part of has a very special place in my heart because I started gardening there 2 weeks after my spouse of 11 years walked out the door, never to return, (except to come back for all his work boots). Weird. He should have known they weren't at home since I sent him a live video of me winging them out of the back of my trunk into the local dump.
I had planned on planting a bunch of tomatoes in my sister's large backyard that year but we realized she wasn't going to have room for the 20 or so plants I had. Not only was I going to be boyfriendless in 2013, I was going to be something even more devastating. I was going to be tomatoless. That would never do.
So a few days after the fella left, when I still couldn't see straight, when each passing day seemed to contain way more seconds, minutes and hours than possible, I walked through the gate of my local community garden. I was recognized (as the very famous medium sized blogger that I am) right away by a woman at the garden who has come to be my friend. One of the many friends I've made over my years there. She helped me find a place for my tomatoes, allowed me into their community and I've been entertaining them with the insanity that is me ever since.
That garden is what got me through the breakup relatively unscathed. It gave me something to do, something to focus on and as anyone who loves gardening knows, it gave me a few hours of dirt meditation every day. Hours where I didn't think of what I was going to do, how I was going to pay my mortgage or if I'd ever have someone to make memories with again.
So thank you garden. I love and appreciate you. But this year you were a real f*cker.
I had to somehow make 2 unlevel side by side plots work and I had to do it in the span of a couple of weeks. Those weeks have come and gone and it still isn't done but at least I'm at the point that I can start planting.
I had originally configured a completely elaborate gardening plan with focal points, arches and underground french watering channels. Then I snapped out of it, scrapped that plan and realized I'm super and I'm a human but I'm not superhuman. I simplified everything, made a basic, old fashioned layout and started digging.
Here's a breakdown of past few years at my community garden. The first year I rented half of a plot from someone so I could just plant my paste tomatoes for making tomato sauce at the end of the year. I managed to mash in a couple of squash plants as well. So I was gardening in a 20 X 10 foot area and was perfectly happy with it.
The next year an entire plot became available in the garden so I moved and set up shop in a different plot. The year after that another plot in a location I liked better came up and I moved to THAT plot and built my raised bed garden in it. The following year the original plot I was in with my tomatoes came up and I got that plot in addition to my raised bed plot. At this point I've therefore graduated from a 10' x 20' plot, to two 20' x 40' plots. But they weren't next to each other. Which lands us in January of this year when I found out the plot next to my raised bed plot was coming available. Are you getting confused? That's O.K. We're almost at the end of my saga.
Since January I've slowly been moving plants, drawing up plans, starting vegetables and digging dirt.
This is how my new plot (which sits to the left of my old plot) looked when I started. It may look like a mess but it's actually a great plot with great soil. The guy who had it before me created raised rows that he amended with compost and manure, plus he planted green crops for green manure in between all the rows. It just about killed me to have to level it out, but level it out I did.
THIS is my raised bed garden which I ended up disassembling completely to make my new plan work. No more wood on the raised beds for me. Not for this year anyway. I'm using all the wood from my raised beds to create a perimeter around my new double garden. I'm still doing raised beds, they just won't have raised sides. It's too much money and too much work for this year.
The process of combining these two unlevel plots had me pondering two directions. Either leave the left garden as it was, slightly raised and terrace it down to my lower plot. Or level them both out. I figured I'd just start digging and see where the soil took me.
The first thing I had to do no matter what was level out the new plot. That involved lugging a few wheelbarrows of dirt to some low points on the land and then using this old fashioned, tried and true method: dragging a wood pallet behind me like a donkey.
.
If you have a lot of land to level there is NO better way than dragging a pallet. Unweighted it simply levels the ground, if you put a couple of buckets of rocks on it, you can actually drag huge amounts of soil to different spots in the garden.
I did this for 2 solid days.
The end result. The end result was also a stomach bulging with newly formed muscles that'll turn back into non muscles in about a week. I was excited, thrilled, filled with the overbrimming sense of accomplishment one normally only gets after cleaning out the fridge crisper.
Then I looked to my right.
Yup.
For the next few days I hung out with my friends the snakes while I transferred soil from the left half of my garden to the right. It was at this point that I realized making both plots level was going to be the easier of my two options. I just had to dig down on the left side garden to make my beds and transfer all of that soil to the right side of my garden to build it up. Easy.
It was around this point, on day 6, that I cried. Just a little. Then I remembered my epic stomach muscles that I'd be the proud owner of for the next week or two and I stopped crying long enough to take a picture of them and send them to my niece. Then I noticed that after burning 37,000 calories a day and buliding washboard stomach muscles I still had my blobs of back fat. And I started crying again.
It was a very emotional time.
That's me. That's my shovel. That's the prettiest I looked the entire time. Proof of that coming up.
By this point in the whole situation I'd lost count of how many days I'd been doing this, why I was doing it and if it was normal to repeatedly punch yourself in the head at night from sleep shovelling. A friend at the garden saw I was perhaps a bit overwhelmed and dug at least 4 of those trenches for me. Had he not, instead of writing this blog post, I would most definitely have just buried myself in one of my trenches and called it a good life while sadly humming Amazing Grace to myself as a raccoon ate my face.
There are people up at my garden who can be there the whole day and still look like they'd be able to go out for dinner straight from the garden. With the Queen. I became this mess after 4.5 seconds in my plot. I gardened from morning until night.
Are you bored yet? Because I was by the point. I was also delirious and as I would later discover, hypoglycaemic. My friend Serena spotted it and gave me juice. And part of a chicken carcass. And some salad, which I ate off of the lid of the salad container, because I forgot about how Survivor taught me you can fold a leaf and use it as a spoon.
I love how pretty I am. I'm so very proud to be so pretty.
Another day, another moment to stop and smell the onions. Here we go again. Someone pass the juice. Along with the snakes, voles, raccoons, and general crawly things that live in the garden I made friends with something astonishing. Something I've never seen before and didn't even know existed.
I made friends with The Green Hornet.
Except it isn't a hornet, it's a bee and it's called a Sweat Bee and it lives in the ground, not in a regular bee hive. But it is a genuine bee and it is LIME green. That photo is straight out of my iPhone camera. No enhancing, no increasing the colour, no nothing. THAT is how the bee looks.
Seeing that little bee gave me all the energy I needed to plant the very first thing in my garden. I haven't finished building the garden but I had to get my strawberries transplanted from my old plot to my new one. A few more hours of digging later and they were moved to their new home.
Like I said, the garden isn't done but it's more done that it was. And that's all someone who ever wants to accomplish anything can ask for.
As long as you're closer to your goal today than you were yesterday you can rest easy in knowing that you'll eventually get there.
(As long as you don't punch yourself unconscious in your sleep and remember to drink lots of juice.)
Have a good weekend!
Melissa
You Are so superhuman!
Debby
"As long as you’re closer to your goal today than you were yesterday you can rest easy in knowing that you’ll eventually get there." Those are words to live by. I haven't read anything that sensible or uplifting for a very long time. Thank you.
Karen
:) Thanks Debby. ~ karen!
Isabella
Karen, kudos. What you do single handed we do with a team of four. My DIL, our son, my husband and self. We have an acre planted with an orchard and most veggies. Tomatoes, cukes, dill, garlic, onions, squashes, melons, artichokes,berries, grapes, beets, carrots, kale and rhubarb. We freeze, sauce, dehydrate, can and pickle. Last night we had oven roasted potatoes, artichokes and kale as part of dinner and cheesecake made from our own eggs with a Marion berry topping, also from our garden. Nothing makes us happier than eating and sharing what we grow.
But it really takes a TEAM to do what you do so how you do this all on your own is simply remarkable.
We have a major gopher/vole problem so each of our beds is gopher wired 18 inches below the surface. We also have a resident gopher snake that fortunately stays hidden during daylight hours and hunts at night but he's got so much work to do he'll never catch up. We use no sprays or poisons so getting rid of things with those is not an option.
We've tried traps but after 7 years of gardening here we have given up on them. Ditto for the batttery operated probes stuck in the ground. Have you a vole solution?
An old rancher here said the only thing you can do is get an infrared scope and patiently sit and shoot all night. Funny guy.
You are an inspiration to all of us. Now when I have a project that seems daunting I just tell myself " Karen could do this without a husbands help" and I just do it. You're a walking, cussin, joking ball of energy and positivity who can also write. Thank you for all you do that you aren't even aware of. You are setting such a great example for all women. You tiny little rocking gardener.
Karen
Thanks for saying that Isabella. :) That gives me just enough energy to get out to that garden again today. ONE day it'll be done. One day ... :) ~ karen!
Sheila Turchyn
You never cease to amaze me, Karen B.!
I've learned a lot and laughed a lot too...maybe shed a tear or two as well. Keep up the good work! :))
Jane Doe
Just want to say thank you. Not gardening but ... I was wrapping a project at 2:45 this morning-- not procrastinating, just a slog-- while the rest of my roommates were sleeping. And grousing about my over developed work ethic. Thanks for putting it in perspective. We do what no one else does, so that later we can have what no one else does. -grin- Hang in there.
Agnes Boisvert
Hopefully this isn't a broken record question you've answered several times already: after all this work, are you still going home and maintaining your front yard garden or has that been modified into something else?
judy
Gee Golly Willikers,Holy Mackeral and jumping green,strange legged Bugs. Golly Girl you must be the most alive- Earth connected human in the whole wonderful weird Universe.
I swear if Humanity got back outside away from the walls and stuff and electronic impersonal communications we would be nicer happier and get along heaps better.
I pretty much have the news on 18 hours a day waiting to see what divine Leader has destroyed lately. We now revere all tyrannical Despots and spit in the eye of our most valued allies. I don't think he likes Canada much either...which just shows how really really dumb he is cause I visited Canada once 50 years ago and the people were great and everything was immaculate...the difference between the American side of the Falls and the Canadian side was like the difference between an outhouse and a mansion bathroom. Too old to cope with this Sh*t. somebody wake me up...please!
Karen
You know what's funny Judy? I live about 45 minutes from the Niagara Falls border and growing up, my Aunt lived on the American side in Niagara Falls. We'd go visit here and I was always amazed at how different it was just crossing over from one side to the other of Niagara Falls. I couldn't understand how they could be so different, but they were. I'm still not entirely sure how they can be so different. :/ ~ karen!
Mary W
You can do it, you can do it, put a little power to it - go girl, go, go girl, go! I'm so proud to be subscribed to follow you - what an inspiration you are. To top it all off, you take pictures and then go back to work. Just for us. Man, oh man, you are super woman, hear us roar, in voices too loud to ignore, YEA for Karen, always giving more, more, more. Someone we all ADORE! Your garden is beautiful and so are you.
Karen
Thank you for the poem! ~ karen
Carol Hogan
Dear Karen - You are amazing and inspiring and I am so jealous I could spit. Enough of the honesty. I remember when the fella left. But, you were not broken. You have risen from the ashes, or the dirt, and become superhuman. You are. Yes, yes, you are. And I want to be you!
Karen
LOL, I'm definitely not superhuman. Just very determined and curious. ~ karen!
Linda Stengel
You are a wonder woman no doubt in my mind. Beautiful garden. Always an inspiration.
Garth
So nice to see a community garden with sensible sized plots, instead of 4'x 8' postage stamps that aren't worth the gasoline it takes to drive to them. They do have their benefits, but producing a significant amount of food isn't one of them.
Karen
Those smaller plots are great for people who are new to gardening and would be overwhelmed by something like mine. People have a romanticized vision of what it's like to have a vegetable garden. Planting the seeds/plants is all they think it is, when in reality the planting part is the most insignificant part of the entire process, lol. ~ karen!
Susan
You had me until the snake. Then I had to scroll down and look sideways to make sure there were no more snake pictures before I could read the captions. I'm sure you must be related to my mother. She had a garden big enough to feed a small town. She also instilled me with a horror of waste and probably put me off tomatoes for life. My father talked her into going to the cottage just when the tomatoes were starting to ripen and I'd come home from work, go to the garden and grab the ripe ones for a toasted tomato for supper. That progressed to toasted tomato for supper, breakfast and lunch. Then I was coming home and running out of hands so I held up my dress (yeah, I'm that old!) and filled the skirt. That kitchen full of tomatoes inspired me to make my first ever batch of tomato sauce before they came home. I don't remember poisoning anybody so it must have been alright. Now I plant one big heirloom and one golden cherry and still end up giving most of them away. And can tolerate one toasted tomato sandwich a year.
Karen
Hahaha! Yeah, I made myself sick on asparagus soup one year in a similar fashion and still can't choke it down. Not even once a year! ~ karen
Kari in Dallas
Holy shit, Karen! Do you plan on just taking the whole thing over next year? What do you do with all of your produce? I have a small kitchen garden, and am drowning in tomatoes.
Keep up the amazing work....can't wait to see it in a month,
Karen
I preserve a lot (tomatoes to tomato sauce, cucumbers to pickles etc.) but I give a lot away to food banks, family, friends. Plus I store a huge amount of them like potatoes, carrots, beets, squash ... ~ karen!
Kelly
"As long as you’re closer to your goal today than you were yesterday you can rest easy in knowing that you’ll eventually get there." This is so good. Excited to see your garden and live vicariously through you, as I have a tiny porch and no yard. I'm thankful for gardening friends who share their bounty.
Katie C.
"As long as you’re closer to your goal today than you were yesterday you can rest easy in knowing that you’ll eventually get there."
I love that. It's really something good to remember for anything you're trying to accomplish.
I think I'm going to have to go buy some plants for my garden because it's been so wet and cold here in New England that everything I moved outside seemed to have keeled over and died. I'm very sad. :(
Karen
It's literally been cold and wet here until yesterday too! It's been downright depressing. Hopefully we've turned a corner. ~ karen!
Ryn
I've barely started my garden, all I have so far are some baby tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini still sitting in my house. But in my defense, I've been building a 24' long x 10' wide x 7.5' high deck, and with work and the weather not cooperating it's taking longer than expected.
Now I just have to remember "As long as you’re closer to your goal today than you were yesterday you can rest easy in knowing that you’ll eventually get there." and hopefully not punch my husband in my sleep. Lol.
Karen
Good luck Ryn. On all accounts. ;) ~ karen
Melissa
I always feel like such a laze-ass when I see your posts. You work circles--- er, planetary orbits around me. But, it is inspiring, so perhaps I'll finish planting my front walk way today in your honor. xo
Karen
Thank you. Send pics! :) ~ karen
Kim from Milwaukee
Ditto, from another lazy ass. I planted my peas, tomatoes, zucchini and cucumbers and I'm exhausted!!
But seriously, Karen, I'm glad you got thru the darkest days in your garden....it's great therapy, I can attest. Thank you for motivating us all!
Susan Claire
It looks like you will be raising enough food for a family of 48, so tell me-what on earth do you do with all that produce? I know some goes into storage, but those are some humongous plots. By the way, we do the pallet thing too, but we hitch it on to the back of the tractor.
Karen
Yeah. I don't have a tractor, lol. I eat a LOT of the vegetables. And I give a lot to a food bank. This year I think I'll be donating them to either a women's shelter or an addiction facility in my neighbourhood. And finally I give extra to any friends or family that come up to visit the garden. :) ~ karen!
jaine kunst
After reading about all your hard work, I realize I am a slacker. I planted 5 perennials and called it a day. You did an amazing job though and I am looking forward to seeing photos of all the wonderful veggies growing in your beautiful garden.
danni
I too have had the "what-the-f-have -I -gotten-myself-into-omg-too-late-have-to-finish-somehow" tears.... but I'll be damned if I ever cried enough to let them actually fall in the dirt! (a few muddy tracks on my filthy face, meh....)
Amazing what a bit of mulish stubbornness can accomplish!!