Times They Are a-Changin'

Garden Fever

It’s been approximately 40 days since I finished renovating the front yard. I’m happy to report that most of the plants are growing well and playing nicely with each other. Except for our mini rose bushes. They look...rough. I read that there’s an acclimation process that goes on when you transplant them, but they are still ‘acclimating’. Acclimating all of their wilted rose petals away. It’s like a crime scene around each bush. In more positive plant affairs, the groundcovers are spreading nicely.  I can’t wait for them all to collide and battle it out. Only one will survive...Will it be thyme? Green carpet? Creeping speedwell? Mystery cover with pink flowers? Ice plant!? The possibilities are endless! 

We planted our garden later than usual this year due to all of the other renovations going on inside and outside our home. Except for our eggplant and one of the pepper plants, everything has been growing nicely. What are we growing this year, you ask!?

Sing along with me…

We’re growing kale and chard, collard and spinach,

Broccoli florets, “peas” don’t “lettuce” forget it!

Brussel sprouts, carrots, beans and blackberries

Eggplant, asparagus, tomatillos baby!

Tomaters and garlic, raspberries and strawbs,

Beets, radishes, crookneck & zucchini squash

Peppers so spicy, they’d melt your face off

And peps so delicious, you’d think they Hasselhoff

Cukes, watermelon, and last of all,

A motherf*#%#in baby, not water...umbilicallllllllllll

Let the record show, she had no part in this…”song”

Encore

We’ve been getting a handful or two of strawberries every few days, which is always a welcome treat. Nature’s lil’ Cadbury eggs...This year we started many of our crops from seed and I reconfigured the drip line system to maximize versatility and minimize breakage and set up time, year over year. 

In other garden news, I also started another small business venture combining my love for bootlegging cocktails with my love for building beautiful garden boxes. I call it...Mikey’s Stiffys. Both started out as jokes and both have been fun adventures. And I have already serviced three customers! The tiered boxes are a bigger hit than I realized and I plan to continue making them in August and September for those who want them. It will be a nice supplemental source of income until the bar scene picks back up.

As we eagerly await our small bundle of joy, I’ve been getting really deep into this gardener work lately. I’ve made a robust crop spreadsheet that outlines when to plant, spacing requirements, sow depth, fertilizer needs and frequency, soil needs, and other pertinent plant paraphernalia. I’ve also taken the liberty of buying two compost bins so we can start creating black gold. One’s a standard hot composting bin that you rotate every few days to aerate your refuse and keep the microbes happy. Not super exciting. The other bin though...is the cat’s freakin’ pajamas. 

We are now the parents of 500 red wiggler worms and have what looks like an uncomfortable, giant-sized camping toilet in the corner of our dining room. Aside from the aesthetics, vermicomposting is where it’s at. We get to feed our lil’ wormies scraps of food and newspaper every few days and they shit out the purest of the purest compost. MMMMM...worm castings. So rich and desirable, you’d be a fool NOT to try taking a bite*. We just started composting this week so we’ve got a few months before I have anything to show from it, but we are excited nonetheless. And if you are wondering, that smell coming from the compost bin you have sitting in your dining room is the smell of YOU. Don’t blame it on the worms. You can’t smell the vermicomposter. If you do start to smell it, that means you’re not managing the proper ratio of browns (newspaper, eggshells, coffee grounds, cardboard, coconut coir) to greens (fruit cores, veggie stalks, grass clippings, dried leaves, non-dairy/non-meat food scraps). So yeah, it’s all good under the hood.

*Do NOT take a bite.

In Living Color

In other recent news, we have finally finished reassembling our living room into the room we used to know and love. I still have a little PTSD anytime we sit down to watch a movie, expecting our socks to get a little wet again, but with time I know it will subside. It looks great! In addition to replacing the carpet with tile, I repainted all of the walls and the ceiling to make the room a little brighter. And while I’m not in love with the color I chose for the room, it still looks....decent. The room now has the character of a ‘futuristic’ 1950s era living room. It’s perfect for watching the original Star Trek with Will Shatner!

In Real Life

First family BBQ. May 2020 AC (after corona)

One of the best things that came out of the month of May was renewed social interactions. As we slowly learn that COVID-19 isn’t spread as easily as we all fearfully anticipated, Sophie and I have slowly started reintegrating our friends and family back into our lives. Whenever possible, we try to socially distance ourselves and I still won’t hug people (especially kids...grub hubs for disease), but it’s an important step towards normalcy. Seeing familiar faces has been such a surprisingly enjoyable experience. I’ve never really thought of myself as a people person, but this whole pandemic definitely left a noticeable void in my life. Sophie and I are still nervous about letting people see the baby right away in a face-to-face fashion, but if you play your cards right and you bribe your way into our house, maybe just maybe you’ll be able to see the baby before May 2021…

Final Countdown

We are T-minus days away from birthoff! Somehow, someway, Sophie’s belly continues to stretch and morph into shapes and sizes I could never have imagined. The ostrich egg of our child is slowly descending down the birth canal, with alien scrapes and awkward belly protrusions guiding its way. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be 100% ready, but I’m almost there...we have the nursery set up and all of the necessary baby supplies. Now it’s just a waiting game...We still have no idea if we are having a boy or a girl (shocker). I’d say the guesses are pretty evenly split. For the record though, I think it’s a boy and will be born on Saturday early morning. Not sure why. Just a guess.

Welp...that pretty much sums up last month. On a personal level at least. The last thing that’s been weighing on my mind is the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests. I can’t remember the last time I have been so immersed in social media. Part of me dislikes it, but another part of me feels an inner voice to do my part and speak up about this event. I decided to write a more in depth post about this topic, which you can find here, but I did want to say one thing about it in this post. As I’ve come to grips with the realities that exist in America, I no longer think it’s enough to just not be racist. I think we all need to strive to be anti-racist and proactively do something to get rid of the social injustice that now exists due to hundreds of years of racism. For the record, at a cultural level, I think racism in America is extremely rare. However on an institutional level, I think racism is still alive and thriving in certain sectors.

If you are reading this post, please consider doing something about this issue. It doesn’t have to be big. It can start with a conversation. It can start with getting more involved in your local elections. It can start with watching a documentary. Just do something. I know there are so many other injustices in this world and it’s hard not to ask why we shouldn’t focus on those as well. To that I say this...there are big changes happening right now on this front. There is so much momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Right now. Any additional action you take is going to have so much more traction and impact. Right now.

That’s all I got for now. Phew. It’s weird to think by this time next month, I’ll be caring for a lil’ baby. The world is changing so quickly. Hold on for the ride and let’s see where it takes us.