November 27, 2018
I've been raking the trampled hay out of the stalls before I clean them so that I can use it as mulch around the asparagus bed and mounds. I can get about a pitchfork full a day and save it up until I've accumulated a wheelbarrow load. Having my mulch available a little at a time keeps me constantly gardening. When I get a bale of straw I put it all on the garden at once. This way I'm interacting with the garden every few days and have an excuse to go there. Once I'm there I'll poke around a bit and invariably find interesting stuff..
I'll find myself doing things that I didn't know I wanted to do. A few weeds will get pulled, some raking done, white flies eradicated, weed piles moved. The spirit of gardening is not always in the doing though. Your priorities change when you experience stillness..
November 28, 2018
August is a "Garden of Eat'en", November is a "Garden of Sit'en". The most enjoyable part of winter gardening is the sitting part. Us old folks do that really well. We are just chock full of memories and can relive our lives over and over. Out of habit we just skip the bad memories. Memory is more mystifying than plant cognition. We store images based on rod and cone information from the eye, processed by the synapses and neurons of the brain, but when we recall them, we are often in the image..
Our imagination puts us in the memory like a third party. We see ourselves as if the memory was made by us hovering over head. Kinda strange huh? Sitting in a garden greenhouse makes winter bearable. The rain on the roof is white noise, and like triptophan, can make you sleepy. I'm usually bundled up in layers, so when I get out of the wind I can stay warm enough to sit a bit, and take a walk down memory lane..
November 29, 2018
With all the new discoveries being made about the significance and importance of our gut biome, we begin to think that a diverse diet, made up of a multitude of components, will allow us to harbor vast colonies of beneficial bacteria. It seems that every week a new esoteric fruit or vegetable gets touted as required for optimal health benefits. They are usually hard to find and expensive, so us commoners just chuckle at the yuppie agenda and go on eating dirt. Both common sense and scientific research concludes that a healthy diet consists of a wide variety of foods. I can see an industry evolving to supply the untapped resources of insects nutrients..
They would have to be ground up and encapsulated in order for main stream America to embrace them. We would have ant pills, termite pills, grasshopper pills etc. Then one day a multibug pill..
