The largest pest in my garden is named Jasmine. She roots around, eats things (including blueberry shrubs, not just the berries, the whole twiggy shrub), digs and paws at the dirt, eats birds and hunts small prey. That’s Jasmine in the photo above.
Yes, I think she’s beautiful, and she is one of my best buddies. But, I still need to keep her from uprooting and eating all my plants! In the photo above, she’s rooting around near my blueberry bushes. Here’s the thing, the bushes produce a large crop every year, but we never get any of them because Jasmine eats the berries when they are still green. I don’t even get to fight the birds for them. So this year, I thought about enclosing them in some sort of fencing so that the beast can’t get to them, and I can fight the birds for the blue fruits, at the proper harvest time.
I ordered some seed potatoes this year and needed a place to plant them. I have a few grow bags and know that they are great for growing root crops because when harvest rolls around, there is less digging and therefore, less damage to the crops. So I decided to use the grow bags and place them around the blueberry bushes to serve as a kind of living mulch. I also fenced the shrubs in with a few left over bits and odds and ends from our yard – an old ladder, some wire fencing and a PVC trellis made by a neighbor. The ladder is low enough that I can still step over it, but high enough that it makes the dog nervous, and she can’t step over it. Now we have to wait and see if she tries jumping it when the berries appear.
Other than that, it’s still rather cold, so I haven’t gotten much farther in my gardening adventure this year. I did start a few more plants indoors – Lavender and Hubbard squash. My cool weather/early spring crops are not dying, but they aren’t thriving either.
And that’s about how I feel in general too, I’m just not thriving right now. I don’t seem to be alone in this either, this seems to be the way many people are feeling right now. I have no words of encouragement. I have no advice.
But I do wonder, why it is so hard for those eternally cheerfully happy people to understand that sometimes others don’t want their “You can choose to be happy” advice? That type of advice makes it seem like being “sad” or “down in the dumps” is a choice. It’s not. The choice is how we handle those emotions. And for many people, those emotions can pile up into a mountain that others just can’t even begin to imagine. This doesn’t make someone weak, just like never crying or being sad doesn’t make someone strong.
Why can’t I be an optimistic pessimist? Why can’t I plan for the best (like fencing in my blueberries) while expecting the worst (she’s jumped barriers for strawberries, so it’s not likely we’ll get any blueberries this year)?
Quite honestly, one of the reasons I enjoy working in the yard so much is that the toads, praying mantises, bumble bees, birds, and dog don’t care if I’m crying while I’m weeding. I don’t owe them any explanation, and they don’t ask for one (OK, the toad might ask why I dusted him with corn gluten.). So the rest of you can just bugger off… I’ll be in my garden.
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