A Fond Absence?

It’s been awhile.  We’ve been literally inundated here at home.  It’s been one thing after another, after another, ad nauseum.  I had a foot injury.  Then I had a tooth injury.  Then some major dental work.  In between all of that, the weather has toggled between sixty and one hundred, seventy and ninety, often with just days of each other.  That’s made planting incredibly challenging.

In the midst of all that chaos, I decided, at the latest moment possible, to rip out all the raised beds.  Food forest, here we come!  After three years, I decided to wage all out war on the grass and make the move to permaculture.  The beds were basically grass traps that took literally hours per bed to clean out of all the grass roots.  With up to twenty raised beds, it made spring a nightmare of tedious and labor instensive grass battles and a giant waste of time.  At least for me.

I’ve grown resentful of how I imagined other gardners joyfully planting in the spring, while I hunkered down to spend months hunched over a garden bed digging up grass roots.  By the time I got the beds ready for planting I was exhausted.  Hubs was also not thrilled.  To say the very least.  Ha!

No, I do not want gravel.  We live in a neighborhood obsessed with weed free grass lawns and inedible landscapes.  What that means for me is, that there are no less than five different landscape companies continuously in my neighborhood…for my immediate neighbors….who all have leaf blowers that blow all their junk into my yard that I’m trying to keep weed and grass free.  Rocks and gravel would not be good for us.  And I simply don’t like it.  I like the way the earth feels under my feet.  I can’t walk barefoot in gravel and rocks.

My approach has, and always will be, cultivation and competition.  If the weeds have too much competition, they won’t over run everything else.  Proof is where the strawberries grow.  They’ve out competed the weeds and we didn’t really have to do much.  But that’s hard to do when assaulted with your neighbors weed seeds being blown into your space with a leaf blower.  Infuriating.

I have a lot of posts to catch up on.  Soon!  I have lots of recipes stored and new things coming.  Right now, farming has taken every ounce of energy I’m willing to part with.  I just thought I’d pop on here, say, “Hi, I haven’t left for good and I’ll be back to it soon!”  Love and miss this place.