50mm f/1.4
I've posted some pictures that loosely chronicle the creation of the sunken boat garden. It's just the first year, so it looks kind of thin and pathetic. But that's okay - next year when everything comes back, it'll look better, I think.
Anyway, if I find any more related pictures, I'll add them in.
It is supposed to rain this weekend, but so far it's just cloudy. So I spent some time outside whacking dirt off of the sod I ripped up out of the front yard when I first started this garden. There's a lot of dirt in that thar sod pile, so rather than buy more, I'll harvest this. The grass and roots and grubs go into yard debris bags, the dirt and earthworms (LOTS of earthworms) go into a wheelbarrow, and when there's a good amount of dirt and so forth, that gets wheeled to the front yard and dumped into the garden.
Not that it's a garden yet. It's still a blob-shaped area of dirt with a tired little boat half sunk into one "corner" of it. But that's okay.
There is no rush.
That's the conclusion I came to while I was whacking dirt out of grass roots. There is no rush. There is no deadline. I don't have to get this garden finished before the buzzer sounds. It is a work in progress. And that's the peaceful part of it. I am not in a hurry to reach the end. I don't care if I'm still working on it in September. Who knows - at the rate I'm going, I might be.
There is no rush.
My husband is deadline-oriented. He wants the garden done. Ever since he finished digging that hole and put the boat in for me, I think he has started thinking of the garden slightly in terms of "we" instead of "Jayne's project, thanks for your help, now BACK OFF!" (Which is kind of what I told him the other morning when he was listing all the current things he's stressed about. End of school-year concerts and festivals for his chorus kids...the frustration of learning how to put contact lenses in (and I'm not going to go into THAT story right now at all.)...and "we need to get that garden done..." - WE? Back off, mister, you can't include that on your list of stress - it's my project, not yours.)
So anyway. I'm deadline-oriented too, sort of. Or, rather, I'm rushed a lot of the time. Weekday mornings are an Olympic sport - or should be. And my lunch breaks, most of the time, are either spent at home doing dishes that didn't get done before or prepping something for dinner...or running errands or picking up groceries or diapers or something somewhere....and then after work there's the whole get-the-kids-and-get-dinner-ready obstacle course - the obstacles being two children who are perfectly fine all day but once Mommy is back in the picture it's time to voice objections and yell or scream and cling and demand juice or formula and need a diaper changed and have to go potty....which is fine - it's just a little chaotic at times.
And weekends have been, primarily, the time to do all the laundry, grocery shopping, and basically get ready for Monday. And maybe watch a ball game on TV at some point...while folding clothes.
But now I am getting time to work in this garden-to-be. And the sections of my brain that I use to multi-task at home and at work all week are not required. I work on one single lone task at a time. And today that task was whacking dirt. And my brain, not needed, just kind of relaxed. It just went mostly blank, with little whispy bits of thoughts drifting through like little puffy white clouds...and they did not linger. Whack. Whack. Whack. That's all. Me and dirt and debris and worms and grubs and rocks. Steady, deliberate, easy work.
It's like meditation, only while still doing something. Time disappears. I love that. It used to happen when I did a lot of cake decorating...it also happens when I quilt, though I haven't done that in ages. But maybe this fall I will start up again, once the gardening season is winding down. That will be my colder weather project - with no deadline either.
I have a bunch more dirt to whack...and then I'll add a little lime to the soil and rake it all over that blob-shaped spot...build up the dirt around the back of the boat...fill in the boat some more...and then I can put in the plants.
But there is no rush.
I do not have to have the garden finished by, say, Memorial Day.
Because then what? If it's all done, and all I have to do is monitor it and make sure all the little plants are okay...then what? I'll need a new project. And I don't want one. I like this one just fine. I like seeing the project unfold slowly.
It is a work in progress. There is no rush.
It's in.
Bill came home yesterday, enlarged the hole I'd started, and put the boat in.
The reason there were so many roots in my way before? There had been a tree in that vicinity. Bill found the stump. It's out of the way now.
The boat is IN.
Now, finally, I can put the plants and seedlings in.
Yay!
Thanks Bill!
I overdid it last weekend. I was digging the hole to sink the boat in and I had to do it with a trowel instead of a shovel because there were so many roots going through that area...anyway, I was DETERMINED to get that hole dug.
And so when I felt some sharp little pain in my left arm near the wrist, and through the back of my hand, I ignored it because I was SO close to being done.
Well - I wasn't as close as I thought. We brought the boat over, stuck it in the hole - and it's not wide enough for the boat to kind of lean back at an aesthetically pleasing angle. So out came the boat and by that point it was too late to do any more digging, which is just as well because now I've got a swollen area on the back of my arm, near the wrist - the thumb side - and I got it x-rayed yesterday and nothing's broken, but they figure it's tendonitis - which I've aggravated by doing all my normal things like lifting small children, writing, opening jars, stuff like that. So anyway I'm wearing my carpal tunnel wrist brace now to keep myself from overworking it.
And on top of all that annoyingness, I've got a massive sinus infection. I've had a headache for I don't know how long. I went to bed at 7:00 last night and got up at quarter to 6 this morning...and I still feel like I could go back to bed and sleep for another 200 hours.
But it's time to get the kids' socks and sneakers on (well, sneakers on Alex) and head out to daycare and to work.
But that's the update.
Well, maybe not.
But I got more seeds. So at this point, here's what's going into the garden, plant-wise:
* Various iris plants - blues, blue/whites, and whites. And maybe some of the dark purple dwarf iris I have...because they're short and different from all the other irises. We'll see.
* White baby's breath (which I'll start from seed tonight)
* Forget-me-nots (from seed)
* Some other blue flowering plant whose name escapes me and the seed packet is downstairs
* White rock cress (short plant, white flowers)
* Blue bellflower
* Bells of Ireland - I grabbed this because the flowers are GREEN a cool, pale green, and I have wanted something green in the garden other than just the leaves of everything. I was so excited to see these. (I'm a little loopy at the moment.)
And then - the ornamental grasses:
Blue Fescue - short (10"), BLUE blades and small blue-green flowers
Northern Sea Oats - about 36", silver green with "showy seed heads that resemble flattened clusters of oats." The packet doesn't say where the "sea" part comes in, but that was what hooked me.
Tall Moor Grass - gray-green foliage with purple flower spikes. This one gets up to anywhere from 4 to 7 feet tall. This one will go behind the boat.
So that's it for that garden. I'll put stepping stones through it (which I want to make from concrete...with rocks and shells and beach glass embedded in the surface).
Oh - and I measured the garden this morning - sort of. About 22 feet by 16 and a half.
It's one of my favorite kinds of mornings: pouring rain, windy, dark, chilly.
I very nearly went back to bed just now (Julia woke up a little while ago and I just put her back in her crib), but figured I should do some typing now, if I'm going to stay current with the whole sunken boat thing.
Let's see...last time I said anything about this was Wednesday morning...that afternoon all I really did was mark out an area for the garden with little scrap pieces of wood and then mark the outline with the edger. The edger, if you don't have one, is this half-circle shaped piece of metal on the end of a broom handle. The round edge faces down, and is sharp, like a knife blade. The flat side of the half circle is bent over about half an inch on either side of where it attaches to the broom handle - so you can put your foot on it to push it into the soil. Did I make a decent picture for you? Hope so. The edger is a major player at this point.
Anyway, I marked the garden out in kind of a blobby circle/oval/cartoon character conversation bubble shape and called Bill over to take a look. Alex was home too - Bill took him to the zoo that morning. There are now THREE giraffes! Very exciting. Anyway, Bill came over and I showed him where I wanted the boat to go within the blob shape, and he just looked at the whole thing and said "It's big."
Yep. It is. It's a good deal bigger than I'd originally planned. I blame the gas company. They came out and marked where the gas line is, and it pretty much runs right through where I wanted to sink the boat. So I had to move the boat back so that I don't hit the gas line when I dig the hole for the boat...and so of course the garden just wouldn't have looked right way back in that corner of the yard. (I say "way back" like there's an acre of property in the front, but no...it's not all that big at all.) So I enlarged it. It will take up most of that part of the front yard. I left paths about three feet wide so the lawnmower can go through between this garden and the others. But that's about it.
So anyway. After he looked at it and said "It's big" - which was loaded with way more than just FACT. There was a heap of skepticism and doubt and disbelief, I believe, mixed into those two words. But - to his credit - he did not follow his statement up with "what are you, nuts?" He just nodded and smiled (a grimace of fear) and went back to what he was doing.
I got the edger. Now, operating the edger, in theory, is like using a shovel. You position the edge where you want it to go in, and then place one foot on the top of the blade, and push. That doesn't work on a lawn where all the grass and crabgrass and bits of moss have tangled their root systems in with the tree roots that run along there. So either I'm just totally without the proper leg strength, or the lawn was reinforced really well. It didn't want me there. But. I am stubborn. Or determined. Or both. So MY method was to position the edger, with the handle perpendicular to the lawn, and then JUMP onto the thing with both feet and MAKE the blade cut through the matted grass and root systems. So there. It was like jumping on a defective pogo stick. There was no bounce. Sometimes, though, there was a really tough section of lawn or a thicker tree root that I couldn't cut through and there was not even a downward motion to cushion my jump. I'd be there, perched on my edger, struggling not to fall over. Remember the Tin Man doing his dance after singing "If I only Had a Heart" and at one point he just stood there and looked like he was going to fall this way or that way, and Dorothy and the Scarecrow run over and try to stop him from falling? I kind of looked like that. The Tin Man. On a defective pogo stick.
Well anyway. Like I said, Alex was home, and he wanted to help. Bill wasn't doing anything Alex was interested in, but I had made an outline in the front yard and Alex, for a time, decided he wanted all the pieces of wood I'd used. So as I'm jumping onto the edger - did I tell you it's not a BIG thing - maybe 8 inches or so? So I did a lot of jumping. Alex would meander around and take a piece of the wood - or start to - and I'd yell "NONONONONONONONO! Here Alex, you can have THIS one." (One I'd just passed.)
After a while he got tired of gathering sticks and wanted to get my attention by working his way closer and closer to the street. That worked, of course. We took a break. Went inside. Juice for him, big thing of water for me. It was hot here on Wednesday. In the eighties. I went back to my nogo stick (heh heh heh, get it?) and Alex stayed on the front steps, drinking my water because it was in a cool water bottle instead of his run-of-the-mill sippy cup.
So I finally finished my outline. And it was getting late, we were going to need to get Julia at daycare and make dinner and all that...(actually, dinner was probably in the works by then - ribs on the grill) But I really really really wanted to start ripping up the lawn within my blob outline.
Now. We have a rototiller. I may have mentioned it in the other post. It rips up the lawn. Tills it, with round blades that go around and around. Saves time. Very efficient.
I chose not to use it. Partly because I didn't want to use it near the gas line. I think they run around 18 inches deep, but still. Better safe than exploding.
So it was more fun with the edger. Here's the orderly, methodical side of me helping out the creative "I'm going to paint on a BIG canvas" side of me. I laid out a grid of sorts, with the edger. In workable sections at a time. First made several parallel lines this way...then perpendicular to them that way...so I had little rough squares of sod to deal with. And then I knelt down and peeled (ripped, tore, yanked, pulled, wrestled) the grass up. Got a section done and loaded onto the wheelbarrow and wheeled it around to the back to what became, eventually, a really big pile of dirt and grass. Why didn't I shake all the attached dirt back into the garden-to-be, you might ask? Because Bill had put down some kind of fertilizer that is supposed to kill seedlings (presumably the weed and crabgrass kind, but who knows...our front lawn has never looked lush...hmmm...) and I didn't want the poison going into my new flower bed and killing all my babies.
So - big pile of dirt and grass.
I did one little section Wednesday night, just to get the project started.
And oh, what a project it was. But I went to bed happy on Wednesday night. Dirt ground into my fingers that refused to be scrubbed out...but the joy of a project begun in my heart.
Thursday, we took the kids to daycare and came home, had some breakfast, and I got started. It was a much cooler day - I started out with a tee shirt, sweatshirt and coat, but quickly lost the two outer layers after a bunch of jumping on the edger.
Did I mention the garden outline was big? I think I did. But just in case I didn't - it's big. With the exception of a quick trip with Bill to Home Depot and a break for lunch and a break to go get the kids from daycare...plus a few trips inside to blow my runny nose or to pee, I spent ALL DAY hopping onto the edger over and over and over and over and over and then kneeling or sitting on the ground ripping up the lawn, section by stubborn section.
The best part - which happened early on - was that I found an arrowhead. Really. At first I thought it was just a little rock, then I thought it was a thin chip of slate - but no - it's an arrowhead.
Bill is SO jealous. Really. I showed it to him and he was immediately ten years old. And it was not fair, apparently, that I found it, when he's done SO much digging in our yard prior to the start of my project, and also because he's ALWAYS wanted to find one. ALWAYS. So it's not fair. But too bad. I found it, and it's mine. So there. Plus, if he had dug up the yard two years ago when I FIRST came up with this idea, he'd have found it. So tough.
But apart from that little archaeological thrill (and trust me, lots of little Indiana Jones analogies ran through my head while I was edging and ripping that day...little scenes I was going to use to describe his imagined attempts to get the arrowhead from me...but I didn't type that night and I don't feel like going off on that tangent now. You've probably seen the movies - you can imagine it.)
The other thing that kept going through my mind while I was edging and ripping was the phrase about biting off more than you can chew. And that, while I intend to finish this, and so it is not MORE than I can chew...it's certainly going to take an awful LOT of chewing before I'm done.
I came pretty close to finishing. Just one section left, but I was slowing down by then and it was getting dark. And I was sore. Very sore. I don't normally jump onto an edger seventy-five billion times in a day, so lots of muscles in unexpected places began to protest and then to picket and to riot and pretty soon I just had to stop. I was sore. I know I said that already. But I really need to emphasize it. S-O-R-E. Sore. Head to toe. And to finger. I had about a pound of dirt ground into my hands and embedded deep beneath my fingernails. So I stopped. The last section had been edged into long strips of grass. Didn't have the will to finish the grid at that point. So I put the edger and the wheelbarrow away and went inside.
Later that night I soaked in a hot bubble bath, which felt great at the time but didn't do anything to prevent me from moving slowly and jerkily, kind of like a marionette.
The next day at work I found that when I sat for long periods of time, like a minute or so, everything stiffened up and I had to really focus on not looking like an idiot when I walked. I forced myself to ignore the protests from those normally silent little muscles and WALK like a regular person WALKS. It was a long day.
I finished the ripping of the lawn last night. It rained on and off all day. I wore my yellow raingear - the stuff I bought to wear on fishing trips. (I'm wearing it in that picture in the upper right corner of this blog, in fact.) I looked like the Gorton's fisherman's insane sister out there, kneeling, sitting, sprawling on the wet ground, clawing at the grass while rain dripped on me from the tree branches above or poured on me as a passing shower went by.
I amused myself by imagining what people must be thinking as they drove by. Words like "lunatic" and "whacko" frequented these thoughts. But I persevered. And this last section - actually the last part of this last section - was the WORST. I was close to the tree at this point, so the roots were bigger and closer to the surface and therefore woven tightly into the root systems of the grasses. The lawn did not want to let go.
(Oh, and by the way, this tree I'm talking about - it's barely that any more. So many branches have either fallen off or have been trimmed away that it really doesn't do a whole lot of tree-like things any more. It isn't going to throw a whole ton of shade on my garden, for example, because there aren't a whole lot of branches that will bear leaves. It's main function is to wear the big yellow ribbon that I put up when Joe went to Iraq. And that's enough.)
So anyway...the very last of it...this section roughly two feet by four feet...this was my battle. This was my hell. This was what had me practically prostrate on the ground as I tried to wrestle the last of the sod away from the dirt and tree roots. Inch by muddy inch. My face in a grimace at times...and me muttering TO the roots or grunting or swearing. My hands were nearly black with mud. My face was streaked with dirt - my war paint.
And then it was down to a section roughly a foot square. At that point I was just grabbing tufts of grass, handfuls of dirt/mud, picking out the grubs (there were a TON of grubs in all this. Lots of earthworms too - I kept them but put the grubs on the wheelbarrow of death.)
And finally - a little chunk was left - two handfuls in size, torn out of there one blade of grass at a time, it seemed. The whole experience was nothing like giving birth, but it's the only analogy I can come up with. Both started out relatively easy - yeah, I can DO this! And by the end I was ugly and insane and I just wanted (grunt) to (grunt) get (swearwordswearwordswearword) this (expletive) OUT!. (Actually, I didn't swear during either birth. But really - there is another plane of existence you go to toward the end of labor and it's just a dark, raw place. And no, I didn't have an epidural either time, why do you ask?)
And that's probably why the analogy came to me - I didn't want to be pain free during birth - and I wasn't, trust me...better yet, ask Bill - he witnessed it all. And I didn't want to use the rototiller to rip up my garden spot. This is what I'm like, apparently. I wanted to FEEL childbirth, and I wanted to really WORK this garden with my own hands. And also - I believed that I could do it. (With Julia, though, I had a harder time - and I actually asked for a spinal, but by the time the guy got there to put the needle in, I was 9 centimeters and figured there was no point. But I did come close. A pitocin drip makes for a very different kind of labor.)
Back to the garden. Anyway - I finished. Threw the last handful of grass and mud onto the wheelbarrow and said "So there!" out loud. I stood there for a moment, looking at what I had accomplished, and I felt very good about it. I wheeled the last of the sod to the BIG pile in the back (I will take a picture of that pile today, because it's BIG.) and put the wheelbarrow back in the garage and went inside.
I peeled off the muddy jacket and pants of my bright yellow raingear ensemble, and took off my muddy sneakers and socks, and washed about ten pounds of dirt off my hands. There's still a pound left under my fingernails that I couldn't get out. And that brings me to the title of this post. I didn't wear gloves. Why? I don't know. Another weird quirk of my personality. And one I plan to change, because during my barehanded digging and clawing frenzy, I have caused myself some lasting pain in the middle finger of my left hand and ESPECIALLY the index finger of my right hand. (All this typing hasn't helped, either, but it had to be done.) It looks like the dirt went WAY in and kind of (if you're squeamish about stuff like this, stop reading now. They all lived happily ever after. The end.) ripped the nail away from the flesh underneath, and I'm really not sure if some of the darkness under there is blood or just dirt or both. It hurts like hell. I soaked in the tub again but that didn't get any more dirt out, even scrubbing at it (and screaming silently because it HURT) with a nail brush didn't do much. So I smushed in some neosporin to hopefully prevent it from getting infected, and today I'll maybe soak it in salt water because for some reason that seems like something that might help. Like gargling with salt water when you have a sore throat. Who knows. It will probably sting a LOT. I won't like that.
But that's the price you pay for the satisfaction of having done the job yourself. No, not really. That's the price you pay for being stupid. So I'll wear gloves from now on.
And that's where things are at this moment. I'll take a few more pictures this morning - of the completed blob and of the pile of dirt and grass. Have to finish the roll of film before I can post anything but I will put up pictures periodically. Maybe I should take a picture of my fingernail for you too...
Depending on what the weather is supposed to do, I might get a mess of top soil and work that in...then peat moss and manure...we'll see.
In the meantime - learn from my mistakes: When clawing at the earth, wear gloves.
We had the utility companies mark where the various utility lines are, and even though the gas line pretty much runs right through the area that I want to put the garden in, I won't have to dig deeply there, so I think we'll be fine. And - best of all - there is space to half-sink the boat, the way I've pictured it. So - YAY!!
And since schools are on vacation this week and Bill, the teacher, is on vacation too, and the weather is good, and I'm all pumped up about this, it's the perfect time to rip up that section of yard and get things going. So I'm only working half a day today and I took all day tomorrow off so that we can get the major digging and lugging of the boat done while we're both home and the kids can be in daycare. Weekends will be okay for planting and stuff, - oh, wait, there I go apologizing for putting my kids in daycare while I do major yard work. I have to stop that. Actually, Alex is going to the zoo with Bill this morning, so there. I'm pathetically insecure about some things.
Anyway - back to the topic. I've been calling it "the sunken boat project" - so as I post updates and take pictures, looks like that will be the official title of everything connected with it.
Of course, as usual, my brain is leaps ahead of the actual physical reality. I already see the finished product. I need to slow my brain down. This is not going to be FINISHED tomorrow. It will only be started. And then it will be an ongoing thing probably for a decent chunk of time, as I add different plants...put in some kind of border...and whatever else I want to add to the picture.
But anyway, figured I'd make that little announcement.
And now - Alex is getting louder upstairs, oh - and I hear Julia too - so I should get going.
