Fridge Full of Sauces

There’s a part of my left hip that clicks. Whenever it happens I think about how I have not kept up with my yoga practice for years. I’m pretty sure that was one of the reasons why I loved doing the pigeon pose.

I spent the last two weeks working on resetting my outdoor space. In my head, there’s a version of myself that lounges on a nice outdoor furniture set, in the shade, sipping something, and reading a book. I’m also finding my physical limits have been about the same in the last 10 years. The only difference is, I’m learning when to stop. I’m learning that I can do about 4 to 5 hours of outdoor work. Cleaning, planting, building things, moving things around. With plenty of water breaks in between and just a nice cool shaded place to rest so I can figure out what my next moves are. In the past, I would have worked 6-7 hours until the job is done and dealt with being broken for the rest of the week.

Up until this point in time, the backyard had been somewhat of a graveyard of past ambitions. I have various different kinds of planters everywhere. I have 7 greenstalks where maybe 2 levels were in use. I had elevated beds that were not near any easily accessible water source. I have hundreds of planting bags but no easy way to regularly water them. What I ended up with is a cluttered yard, a couple trays of strawberries, a huge rosemary bush, and an abundance of oxalis.

Last weekend was our turn on our city’s clean up campaign. What it means is I can throw close to whatever the hell I want at the curb and somebody will pick it up. The interesting twist is that other people will come through to pick through the trash and pick things off before the clean up crew comes in the middle of the week. I got to work a week before to pull things out, and the yard seems to be the easiest place to start. I just put myself into a routine and mentally separated myself from the person doing the work and the person with a plan. It’s an interesting exercise where I just set a vision and, almost in 3rd person, get the job done. Turns out once I get started on a roll, it’s hard to stop.

In the last couple of weeks, I managed to:

• Clear the storage space under the porch – mostly because I had some old lawn tools buried in the space
• Reorganized my drip watering supply – also bought a bunch more things to accommodate for the new automated in line controllers I got
• Removed all the “dead” planters from my driveway. RIP garlic experiment. I’ll find a better way to grow you later
• Moved all 7 of my GreenStalk towers to the driveway. Consolidated everything worth saving to a single tower. My longer suffering strawberry is thriving now.
• Created an automated watering solution for the single tower I just set up. Everything else is staged for extension to set up the other 6 towers.
• I planted 3 tomatoes, 3 peppers, and some experimental corn stalks my neighbor had leftover
• Redid the drip watering for my veggie planting area that’s been bugging me for years
• Rebuilt the trellis in the veggie planting area so I can properly support the tomatoes
• Relocated some big bushy fragrant plants to create a sensory area – rosemary, white sage, pineapple sage
• Finally tapped a hose up to my seedling rack. Can’t wait to get the drip hoses set up so I can get regular automated watering when I get seedlings going.
• General clean up of the space so I don’t have random pots and knick knacks laying around
• Reorganized my grow trays and pots by my potting bench
• Rebuilt the hop trellis – the Kent Golding is doing exceptionally well this year. Really hoping for a useable quantity of hop cones this year
• Emptied the wasteland of the porch planters
• Reorganized the planters by the potting shed so they are by a water source for automated watering
• Moved a stray rain barrel to make room to properly store my bbq grill/smoker
• Major reset of a longer planting area that’s been a puzzle for me for many years. We first used it for tomatoes and stuff, it but it was never really organized. I got the idea to build a cage around it as a convertible greenhouse, protective area a while back. Honestly all it was keeping out was me. I took down most of it yesterday and reset the ground. Tested the watering, and put in new larger grow bags. I now have a good vision of using that as my squash and beans area. I’ll need to start picking out seeds.

So I did a lot in the last two weeks. In addition to that I got rid of a lot of stuff, and did a hard purge of the basement while we were at it. I wrote about my irrational regret of letting things go a few weeks back, and I really hung on to that while I was doing my clean out. I hang on to things that might have been well loved and useful in the past, but have been cast aside because of diminished value and replacement by better things. But I still hang on to them because there is still perceived value to them. All it really did was clutter my space, becoming this physical and mental pressure that slowly build up over time. I often feel guilty about getting a new thing to replace the old, so I don’t do it. I am then stuck in this middle place where I don’t have a useful tool for the things I want to do and I spiral. I’m glad to be in the path of clearing out space now. But it’s hard work, both mental and physical.

Through all of that, I managed to really just take myself out of it and create a narrative. It was one thing after another. I was feeling better and better mentally while I was doing it. I kept working through my lunch hours and did a ton of walking. I lost two pounds in the last couple of weeks.

It’s weird to me, but not surprising, that when I finally started tackling some of my most dreaded tasks, I started to feel better mentally. I’m not used to having that space to really think about what I need to do for myself. It took me two months to really start thinking about, and act on things that really helps me in the way I need it to. I feel proud of all the things I did to start creating a vision for myself, to take ownership, to move past obstacles. Sometimes I just need that shock to the system to get me out of the 10 year rut I’ve been on. There’s so much accumulated fatigue and so many regrets I’m able to address now it’s refreshing. Hopefully I can keep going and really create a vision for myself and find my way forward.