The Manic Gardener

This is part of an ongoing series about my father's stroke. In this post, the personal part follows a fairly straightforward gardening entry. Quit at the divider (a row of asterisks) if you're not interested in the memoir portion.

It is, astonishingly, not raining.  That's not to say that it won't be raining by the time I finish this post; nor does it mean that it didn't already rain earlier today, because it did. In fact, it snowed. Welcome to Montana.

When it started raining the day before yesterday, I grabbed a raincoat and kept working. I'd set out to do some serious weed control on the flagstone path that lies between my vegetable plot and the strawberry plot in the garden I tend next door. This meant weed cloth, as the worst offender is well-established bindweed.

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I have been trying to write this post off and on all day. That shouldn't surprise me; I've been trying to write it off and on for months. If there’s a good way to write about my father's stroke, I haven’t found it. So I’ve given up on doing it “well;” I’ll just do it.

It's ten o'clock in the evening, and four hours of resetting the paved path next door have pretty much done me in. The students who rent the house let me traipse in and out of their yard, for the sake of an occasional strawberry or bunch of lettuce or potatoes. I'm putting weed-cloth under the paving stones because getting control of the weeds (especially the bindweed) running rampant under that path is essential to getting control of the weeds in the garden. This was a rare, sunny day–the first in weeks, so naturally I spent hours gardening errands that could have been done in the rain, but by late afternoon I was digging in the dirt.

Continue reading →

I have been trying to write this post off and on all day. That shouldn't surprise me; I've been trying to write it off and on for months. If there's a good way to write about my father's stroke, I haven't found it. So I've given up on doing it “well;” I'll just do it.

It's ten o'clock in the evening, and four hours of resetting the paved path next door have pretty much done me in. The students who rent the house let me traipse in and out of their yard, for the sake of an occasional strawberry or bunch of lettuce or potatoes. I'm putting weed-cloth under the paving stones because getting control of the weeds (especially the bindweed) running rampant under that path is essential to getting control of the weeds in the garden. This was a rare, sunny day–the first in weeks, so naturally I spent hours gardening errands that could have been done in the rain, but by late afternoon I was digging in the dirt.

Continue reading →