I’m grateful for the first wild asparagus of the season! I look forward to several harvests from this secret patch, and more from elsewhere.I’m grateful for apricot blossoms! They opened between this morning and this afternoon, like little popcorns at the tips of twigs.
Today I’m grateful for so much. I’m grateful that I woke up after a long night’s sleep feeling like a million bucks. All vestiges of vaccine aftereffects are gone. I’m grateful that Stellar had a good day outside, too. I had energy all day to play in the dirt, amending soil in the raised beds, setting up irrigation hoses, and basking in awareness of this precious wild world of which I am a part, observing all the new sprouts and blossoms, listening to the phoebes, robins, finches and other birds, breathing fresh mountain air under a cloudless bluebird sky. I’m grateful that the conditions of this life I’ve come to in this moment allow me to spend a Sunday in bliss in this garden.
A new gateway from the garden to the dog pen opens up a whole new world of gardening possibilities.
For a couple of years I’ve been planning a new gate between the dog pen and the fenced food garden. Last winter Mr. Wilson cut the gateway, and though I’ve yet to create the actual gate, the way is open now. Once the snow melted and Stellar led me into the dog pen through the new gateway, I discovered a whole new yard space. AND, more garden space! Along the right side backed up to a raised bed there’s a good ten feet of found space to build a raised bed, and then along the left side behind Stellar, another ten or more feet. These beds will start small this year, maybe just a few mineral tubs or other containers, or maybe a few feet of shallow raised beds each, but there’s plenty of room to expand. And since one challenge I’ve noticed in the food garden is an excess of sunshine (believe it or not) and a paucity of shade, this new area will provide a climate-modulated option for some vegetables that need less than 13 hours of full sun per day in mid summer.
The new gate is directly in line with the main garden gate heading east-south-east, and across the dog pen (shady, green, a whole new yard space as well as garden space) there is another potential gateway: a corner of fence that’s been mangled by some large creature jumping over it: elk? deer? mountain lion? Later this summer, I’ll replace the bent fence with another new gate, providing a straight shot from the east door, through the garden, out into a rarely traversed piece of the woods. Expanding horizons by making gates where previously there have been only fences.
In trying to straighten the mangled fence and failing, I suddenly realized it was the perfect place for yet another gate.I’m grateful for nature’s resilience and creativity. Exploring the old dog pen which I haven’t used for a couple of years, freshly revealed by access through the new gate, I discovered several rotted dog rugs that have been reclaimed by Mother Earth. The moss is only on the old rugs, nowhere else around them.
I’m grateful to see the first garlic shoots popping up.
I’m grateful I got to spend a whole day in the garden. I chose to leave everything inside undone; today was the first day since sometime last year that it was nice enough to spend the whole day outside. From morning coffee til evening cocktail, Stellar, Topaz and I did our own things out in spring sunshine: Stellar mostly worked on his hole under a juniper, alternately digging and sleeping in it; Topaz inspected our progress and watched birds; I covered the rest of the tulips with chicken wire, cleaned up, rearranged and visualized in the food garden, brought out some hoses and watered for the first time, zoomed with cousins, ate and read and wrote, and planted a few more patches of seeds. After sunset I sat up on the deck and watched the rising of the first super moon of the year. It was a perfect Sunday spent in worship.
Topaz examines the lean-to infrastructure and finds it satisfactory.Chicken wire cages protect nascent tulips from marauding deer, and I’m grateful all over again for my birthday present from Rosie, a beautiful kinetic sculpture I was finally able to stand in the thawed ground of the Buddha bed.In between our yard and garden projects we found time for a few short walks in the woods.Sunset light on a tire planted with tulip and crocus bulbs. I’m grateful for his skillful supervision.
