Ugh, sorry. I’m distracted. Something strange is going on with me. The past two days I’ve been feeling terrible after lunch, I mean, crazy depressed and down. Emotionally terrible, not physically. And then right about 3:30 it starts to clear up and I feel like myself again. I’m trying to decide if it’s the beef. I haven’t been eating a lot of it and then I had for lunch yesterday and today and I don’t know if it’s doing something funky or what, but god damn. I think it’s got to be something I can do something about, though because it seems to be triggered by lunch (I feel fine before I eat) and then seems to clear up as lunch digests.
I’m going to try to go vegetarian for lunch tomorrow and see if there’s a difference.
And I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what I want to blog about over at Feministe. The guest bloggers they’ve had so far have been so damn good and I just don’t want to get on there and not rise to the occassion.
We have a tiny watermelon in our garden, though, so that’s happy. It’s like the size of a jawbreaker. I know I’m thinking too far ahead, but how will I know when it’s ripe?
And the Butcher was all alarmed because he thought our pumpkins were growning a giant zucchini and so I went out there and realized he didn’t know pumpkins were green before they ripen. Ha, poor Butcher. We’re going to have a shit-ton of pumpkins, though, I think. I hope the neighbors feel like celebrating Halloween this year, because we will have plenty to share.
I’m always taken aback by how quickly stuff appears. The Professor and I were just out there on Friday, weeding and examining things and moving them around and there were no watermelons and certainly not as many pumpkins. And we are so close to having a shit-ton of tomatoes.
I don’t know. The thing I was thinking about today when I was feeling all depressed is that most of the stuff I do every day doesn’t matter. It’s not important to anyone. I love blogging, but really, that’s a very small portion of my day. But it makes me feel good, and connected.
But I also like growing things and being outside in the dirt. And I’m not sure you could get any more mundane or non-matter-y than that. We don’t need the garden to live. It doesn’t have to feed us. Anything that comes out of it is just a bonus. And yet, it’s something I love.
I keep thinking my problem is that things I do don’t matter, but maybe the truth is that I enjoy frivilous pursuits. It’s actually the stuff that doesn’t matter that makes life worth living.
Filed under: Random Things
I don’t know, I think you could make an argument that gardening does matter, in an ancient ingrained kind of way, even if it isn’t for subsistence. I think the idea that it doesn’t matter is a modern construction, possible only in a world of industrial agriculture. A world, also, that makes it possible and even necessary for the vast majority of us to do things that don’t matter.
In other words, the problem isn’t you. It’s the world. On the other hand, I sort of enjoy being able to knit and cook in a more frivolous capacity, and not because I’m depending on that sweater to keep me from freezing to death.
So…maybe try locally raised pastured beef? ;)
So do you have squash? Mine aren’t doing so well. And the other two people I’ve talked to about it say the same thing.
I’ve had one zucchini, but it was huge. And the pumpkins seem to be doing well.
But those are my only squashes.
So are your pumpkins looking a little, um, despot-y? My friends had a vegetable garden and their pumpkin decided it was in charge, rapidly colonised the whole garden bed, then crept out to take over the lawn… I never knew if it was their pumpkin, or pumpkins in general that seem to make these land-grabs….
Oh also – I know what you mean about “mattering” thing… no easy answers, but I know when I get completely overwhelmed by the world and how much there is to do to fix it, a retreat into simple things is the best answer to retaining my sanity and re-charging overall…
So weeding the garden may not matter to the grand scale, but in terms of providing you with a haven, a place you feel at home and comfortable? That value, to me, is inestimable….
AussieAndrea, we have our pumpkins all at one end of the garden and back behind the garden, along the fence, is a lot of scrub brush and some trees we haven’t quite decided what to do with. The Professor had to go out and liberate some of the smaller bushes from a pumpkin which had decided to… I’m not sure what… make a break for the cow pasture?
But yes, they will make extraordinary land grabs.
And I have to admit that it’s quite possible that a small family only actually needs one pumpkin plant to meet all of their pumpkin needs.
And we have, I think, a half dozen.
Ha, that’s going to be interesting in the fall.
Well, on the one hand, I agree with AussieAndrea about things that matter in small. But on the other hand, I think you’re both missing something. Which is that the grand, heroic gestures and one-time decisions, while they are important, don’t actually matter more than doing the routine, daily things. Dailiness keeps the world going. (In a garden, that’s clear: no watering and weeding mean less of what you’re trying to grow.) And if we’re mindful, keeping up with the daily stuff gets us prepared and keeps us prepared for the big, difficult things with their obvious Importance.
Oh, and W, I have been having terrible trouble with squash. Dianne was giving me advice about hand pollination in another thread. But when I went out to try it out, I saw bees in the squash blossoms, so I decided that wasn’t the trouble. I also found three teeeensy hidden zucchinis. So maybe my squashes are just slow.
You know what else, you want to pick the zucchini before they get huge, so the plant will make more.
Ours are doing well in Philly, I probably got fifteen pounds of zucchini from our one plant in the past week. Ha ha, Tennessee!