gardening flashbacks
the pull-behind garden tiller which FINALLY arrived last week has been getting quite a workout. we have 130 acres to work with, so there is no shortage of potential plots to turn into gardens. hubs, our farm assistant and i have been happily channeling all the anticipation that has been pent up since the first covidic delay back in november.
hubs and i have quite a bit of repressed baggage to work through in the gardening arena. herstorically, i have chased hubby out of my garden far, far more often than i have asked him for help. in our early years, gardening was a honey-do chore for hubby. he found no joy in gardening that i was able to discern. he showed up to take orders like a "good hubby" hoping to get laid. plants and gardens have been my lifelong refuge. ordering stiff dicks around is not and never has been my idea of a good time. if you doesn't wanna be here, please leave me in peace. now.
we had found our peace in that equation by the time eldest son (es) was old enough to show his green thrumb, and the boy did, indeed, have the bio-connection which runs so deeply in our bloodline. prior to the onset of his narcolepsy in early adolescance (mid 90's), es and i enjoyed uncounted hours on nature walks and in the garden. by the late 90's, that bond had turned into a competition. anything i could do, he could do better. he often **proved** it by haphazardly destroying my work with his newest discoveries and theories but seldom, if ever, carrying through on the project. our fights over this development were epic and typically without witnesses. hubby was seldom aware of them until they started resulting in broken windows, shattered fish tanks and police intervention. at that stage, we were living on a small urban lot with very limited space to work with.
fast forward to 2011 when we moved to another, significantly larger urban lot. the half acre lot is big by urban standards, but the space is still quite limited. our sons were 31 and 27 and living quasi-independently. officially, neither ever moved back in, yet somehow they were in full residence shortly after the move. i distracted myself from those tensions by putting in my first garden. i still believe it was my best garden ever, but not for long. es started attacking it while it was still under construction. that was nothing new to my senses. our garden wars were in their second decade by then. where's the surprise? when hubby got his first sets of bees in spring, 2012, they melded beautifully into my award winning garden. bees and gardens are as natural a match as humanity ever created. somewhere between there and summer 2013 when i moved out, hubs had joined es's side in the garden wars and was well on his way to being a garden expert. the garden was solidly trashed. when i stayed at the house for ys's funeral, i found extra reasons to cry as i walked through the remnants of my award winning garden. so close and yet so far. . .
hubby and the farm assistant (fa) have been going great guns on putting in permanent raised beds on tilled soil. why on earth would you bother tilling beneath a permanent raised bed? the great strength of permanent raised beds is to eliminate the tilling step. hubby verbally attacked yesterday when i raised the question. i immediately transported back to the epic fights which chased me from the urban homestead. works in progress to bring myself back to the here and now.
again i leave the mood icon on the rapid cycling median. sigh. . .
Replies
(((Hug)))
I guess with hubby retired now he wants some projects..... Maybe you can send me a tomato???.... Big squishy hug.... xo
hubby was on this trail long before he retired from his corporate gig. we didn't/don't see that as retirement so much as simplifying the equation. our farm LLC still needs lots and lots of work, including the gardens which are triggering this flashback series of es's transition from a bright, gifted child to the morbidly obese, drug abusing slug he is today at 42.
so far, the skid with hubby is looking like nothing more than a bump in the road. we were able to talk it through and seem to be solidly back on track. would you like a few dozen eggs and a jar of honey with those tomatoes? i've got so many eggs that i'm composting them.
I'm sorry about the flashbacks sweetie..... Drug addiction is such a terrible illness for everyone involved..... I'm sorry that you're going through this... Big hug....xo
My dad was an alcoholic for a long time who eventually went to treatment and got sober.... It's really tough for all who love them..... xo
Hey Arfie, I haven't been on much the last few months. I've returned to school and maintaining a 4.0. Still home schooling the grandson and had a battle with his school. Moved out of the narcissist house and settling into new place.
Sounds like you've got a lot going on too... wore me out reading your post. I love gardens and growing things, wish I still could. A few easy care house plants are my limit now.
the gardening flashbacks are still going, as are the farm works which are triggering the flashbacks. methinks the flashbacks are percolating toward resolution. the broken windows, harsh words, etc., etc., all happened and remain painful memories, but? ? ? is that acceptance softening the crusty surface of those psycho snot knots? is that compassion loosening the threads tangled in those psycho snot knots? are hubs and i starting to find easier conversation about our earlier gardening experiences?
our farm assistant (fa) is a city girl, to the core. the agricultural traditions "en mi pais" and potted plants are a hefty percentage of her farming knowledge. whatever the continent or dominant language, a city is a city is a city. cities offer precious few opportunities to understand farm life, however tied our ancestors were to the land. even an old man who left the farm in his youth is more city slicker than farm boy. use it or lose it.
this is fa's first go-round with farm life, "y bien differente que en mi pais." she has lived in the old farmhouse since fall, 2020. i remain more than a bit skeptical when she tells me of those cultural traditions. can i check that fact with a farmer "de su pais?" the appearances of a lifetime can be even more deceptive than first impressions. the appearances from a city window don't speak many truths of farm life.
her beginner's enthusiasm has met with hubby's sophomore enthusiasm to create some interesting experiments. i have been encouraging their enthusiasm from a proper social distance, offering as few opinions as possible while i work my own projects. girl, howdy, i am grateful for the 130 acres which allow for that proper social distance. on the half-acre urban homestead, the heartbreak of permanent bed construction atop my carefully tilled and mixed soils had precious little space to allow for starting over in another location. here, i don't even need to ruffle the beginner enthusiasm as i start anew elsewhere.
a month later finds me afraid to approach that garden tiller. hubby and fa have reached the maintenance phase of the many projects initialized during that initial frenzy and are currently learning that initializing a project is far easier than the maintenance of growth, both expected and unexpected. herstorically, this would be where the project(s) is handed back to me on the assumption plan, complete with generous criticisms of how i violated their initial design. i am still attempting to encourage them from a safe social distance.
meanwhile, my compost pile is looking like my best yet but collecting materials for that pile is proving to be an ongoing challenge in addition to the other labor intensive tasks of childcare inside the house and the ongoing guesswork of which direction my fellow adults will be moving today. earlier this week i bought a cheap(ish) lawn sweeper with dreams of an easier materials collection system. the "some assembly required" portion of the endeavor came with assembly directions from hell. hubby responded with the business-as-usual i still have no safe words for. he responded with the usual spit and venom. i'm kinda proud of myself for how quickly i was able to increase social distances rather than defend myself. yes, dear, you are as right as usual. sorry that i am as wrong as usual.
somehow i managed to get the sweeper assembled within the not-working flow of childcare and dodging hubby. i dodged fa's questions on what i was doing, as well. "no quiero hablar sobre este. no tengo palabras buenas, ni en el ingles, de que estoy haciendo." i am grateful she backed off easily.
the system wasnae as graceful as my dreams, but i am tempted to the sin of pride over the materials i collected in round one. i have set the system evaluation aside for now while i silently evaluate the impact on the compost pile, itself. it is a far larger addition than i have ever attempted before and it be allot to evaluate. another set of eyes on the evaluation remains pretty high on my wish list, but just wishing while i remind myself that life is as life is, whether i understand ^it^ or knot.
an equally obscure experiment that was tit-for-tatted to shreds during the eldest son/FIL/hubby confusions is "compost tea." i started pulling those experiments out of the eggshell piles while hubby and fa worked their initial tiller/raised bed experiments. yowza! the medicinal herb beds i placed during that time frame are thriving.