The flower garden is currently a riot of fading bee balm and poppies. Orange cosmos and spearmint are surging, with daylilies and coneflower holding steady.
The vegetables, while better established now, were attacked early on by slugs and insects, but most of the damage was done by several types of adorable varmint. This seemingly on-purpose behavior pisses me off even though I really know, deep down, it’s really just about their curiosity, their need for constant grazing, their excellent taste in produce, and their need to get along and live in this world. Why I take their… themness so personally is a mystery - especially this year, when, as I admitted in a journal entry, “I let my seedlings die and will have to just plant what I plant.”1 Fortunately I have, and have almost always had for the last two decades, access to plenty of relatively inexpensive and high quality plant starts thanks to local growers who sell their excess at the early markets, before produce is plentiful (thanks to Ben and Molly’s, Sola Gratia, and Moore Family Farm for the plants), but it was a clumsy and kind of emotional start to the season.
Past Me had also planted garlic last November and ordered sweet potato slips before the spring equinox. The garlic did what it’s always done and came up cheerfully (if alarmingly early), but the arrival via US Mail of the sweet potato slips in May brought on immediate stress and shame. My slip orders in previous years had not only gone unplanted, they’d gone unopened because I’d never planted them before and had convinced myself that they probably wouldn’t grow anyway because we’re too far north and besides I don’t have a bed prepared for them. Gardener imposter syndrome is a thing, at least for me.
I vowed this time would be different. I forced myself to open the box within a day of receipt and was horrified-yet-unsurprised to see they were not in great shape, due in large part to the raging heat wave plaguing half the continental US at the time. Thankfully, the very rad people at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange send instructions for coping with this exact scenario. Reader, I actually followed them.
About a week later I planted the still-ailing slips according to the instructions in this book into a prepared (!) bed and put milk crates over them to protect them from direct sun and also from the varmints until Jim and I could get a fence made. Anyway, now we have this gorgeous mess.
The garlic’s coming out over the weekend and I remain vigilant in rooting out basil downy mildew, as I have been every year since 2014. I yanked three plants last week.
Oh, yeah, the garage project. I wrote in December 2023 about my big plan to embark on a buildout, inside the garage at our house, of a studio/workspace.
It’s totally happening! Before anyone gets too excited, the extent of the work I’ve PERSONALLY done has been limited prying a bunch of nails out of studs and holding ladders, thanks in large part to a couple of injuries and the time demands of my day job. Jim cleared out the space and smashed old fixtures and pulled paneling and pegboard away from the walls and cleared out the crawl spaces and filled Dumpsters and did a million other things to get the space ready for construction. I helped when I could. It was determined very early on that a) it would take me approximately 7000 years to do this myself and b) having the space available to use sooner rather than later was more important to me than being stubbornly DIY about it. So our neighbor, Bob the Very Busy Retired Guy, has taken it on as a project and Jim and I continue to work together on making it happen. Up next: Doors and a stud wall, maybe? Yeah.
Stoked!
Thanks for waiting for me to catch up with y’all. My feet are mostly back under me. Just in time, too - there’s
much to be done.
LOTSA (Lisa’s Open Tabs, Saved Aggressively)
This piece from Jay Babcock about the value of just doing your very particular thing quietly and without fanfare came at exactly the right time for me
Related: This central Illinois-ish (?) guerrilla artist seems to be having the best time
My friend Scott’s radio show - local to you if you’re in PDX, available for streaming wherever you may be
Here’s a by-no-means-comprehensive piece about how touring became so essential to music. I don’t see live music much anymore, but when I do…
Thinking recently about Cynthia Connolly’s postcards and the importance of analog communication and the miracle of having it delivered to any address you specify
My seedlings struggled to germinate; growing conditions in the basement were less than ideal for myriad reasons, including grower, uh, error
Oh, yes. I’m constantly dancing with garden imposter syndrome - and my sweet potato slips have been in the ground for a month with no growth, so… maybe I should have read up on how to grow them?! I’m excited for your new space! And sorry about your injuries and rough spring. Glad and grateful to read your words. 💗
Gardener Imposter Syndrome is so real!!