Putting the Garden to Bed

On October 1, i gave a talk to a garden club about Putting the Garden to Bed. Seven weeks later, my gardens are indeed put to bed, and almost everything on the check-list is done. Garden hoses put away. Outdoor chairs now sit in the garage. Birdhouses are cleaned out. Most of my vegetable garden beds are mulched with hay.

The gardener topped off the compost bins with manure on her last day. Oh, sigh. The gardener is gone. I miss her already.

The gardens have gone to bed, ready for their long, long sleep. Now that i have an extra hour or two each day, i can get going on some of my writing projects. I can work on de-cluttering the house. Again.

Getting ready for the time when i myself go for the big sleep.

Unhook the Hose

It's time to unhook the hoses from their outdoor faucets before water freezes in the hose. One more garden chore for this change of season.

I recently filled out my Advance Directives. I said that i did not want feeding tubes because, as a medical professional pointed out, tubes in means tubes out. Think catheter, for instance. When my body slows down, i want to allow Nature to take its course. That's when it's time to unhook the tubes.

The hoses watered the garden in its prime, but now that the garden's old age is here, it's time to put the garden to bed and unhook the hoses.

Too Hot to Garden

Ninety degrees is too hot to garden. Time to hang up my trowel, roll out the hoses, and water, water, water. (Not one of my favorite chores.)

Some brief gardening might happen at 5 a.m. or at 7 p.m., but in between, it's time to focus on something else. One of those something elses for me is that i'm going on retreat this week. It's time to leave the garden on its own.

To everything there is a season.

A time to plant,
and a time to water.

A time to garden,
and a time to refrain from gardening.

A time to weed,
and a time to let it all grow.

Let it go. Let it be. Let it grow.

Sprayer

I bought a new sprayer for the hose in my solarium yesterday. The check-out clerk said, "Now that's something you don't see every day, in January." I could hear the question in her voice.

"The sprayer on the hose in my solarium leaks, shooting water out of the handle," i said.

The coiled hose in my solarium is very handy for watering houseplants. Much handier than lifting 6 gallons of water in a watering can twice a week.

Sometimes we are called to do things out of season. Some of my friends are parenting their grandchildren. Sometimes our lives do not unfold in a so-called "normal" fashion. I am about to go on a one-month self-retreat, the mention of which makes several of my friends flinch even as they are saying "Good for you."

Life unfolds. The ego tries to control Life, but, really, that is quite useless.
Allow your life to simply unfold today--without your touching it and yet being touched by all that Life has to offer. In season or out of season.

It's Raining!

It's raining! Finally!

We had only a sprinkle or two of April showers, so the May flowers have been beautiful, but dry.

I much prefer that the sky waters the garden than that i drag a hose around in one hand when i have a trowel in the other.

All during April, the class i was teaching on Embracing Change had the assignment of noticing raindrops. But no rain. The class ended Tuesday night, and then it began to rain.

May is a beautiful month to "embrace change." A new flower blooms every day. An old flower dies every day. Yet the change is exhilarating. How can that be?

Today, notice openness to change and resistance to change. How does openness/resistance show up in your life?

Photo from dedidesign.wordpress.com

Repairing the Garden Hoses

I spent 2 hours repairing hoses yesterday. Rarely do i experience such a combination of patience, diligence, and determination on the task at hand.

On the way home from giving a Dharma talk, i stopped at our fabulous hometown hardware store and bought 3 new female ends for hoses that i had already cut the worn, hole-y, or squirting ends off of. By using these lengths of old hose and not simply buying a brand-new hose, i was practicing the voluntary simplicity of "reduce, re-use, recycle." I had tried to recycle the hoses on Saturday at the Swap Shop at the landfill, but they didn't accept them. So now i am "re-using" them :) Sometimes i need just a short length of hose.

In this simple act of repairing hoses, i was practicing half (or more) of the 10 paramis (a.k.a. paramitas). These supreme qualities are the ones we need to perfect if we aspire to be a Bodhisattva or to live a life of service.

1. Generosity
2. Virtue, morality,integrity
3. Renunciation (voluntary simplicity)
4. Wisdom, insight
5. Energy, diligence, vigour, effort
6. Patience, tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance
7. Truthfulness, honesty
8. Determination, resolution
9. Loving-kindness
10. Equanimity, serenity

 

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

The Curly Hose

Last fall, my sweetie brought home a curly hose that looks like a giant-sized old-style telephone cord. I had been looking at these hoses in the gardening supply catalog for a few years, but i wasn't sure it would be quite right for my solarium.

Once the automatically-coiled hose appeared in my life, however, i immediately put it to use. But first, i had to buy a faucet-to-hose adapter at the hardware store, which is very easy to install. Suddenly, i could neatly water my 50 houseplants, even the ones that are 20 feet away from the sink.

There's a lot of meditation paraphernalia in the catalogs. How do you decide which cushion? Which bench? Which statue? Which shawl? We buy beautiful things hoping they will help us calm our mind.

Mostly, i have waited for items to appear in my life. My meditation cushion is a pillow, shaped like a turtle, that my sister made for me a couple of years before i started meditating. My nephew bought me a shawl in Nepal.

In a sense, the paraphernalia hardly matters because once we close our eyes, we are face-to-face with our own minds regardless of the outer regalia. We only need enough to be comfortable.

I do love watering my houseplants with the curly hose. And my purple shawl keeps me warm in the quiet hours of an early morning meditation.

Forecasting Future Faucets

I rolled up the garden hoses and stored them away yesterday. I have 4 outdoor faucets--one on each side of my house. 2 of them are retrofits, because i didn't know when i moved into this house what a gardener i would turn out to be.

I couldn't have known back then that an outdoor faucet under the kitchen window would prove to be very handy for the hillside garden. Or that another faucet--beside the front door--would be very useful for watering the garden beside the front door. I had no idea there would even BE a garden at the entrance to my home.

As busy as our minds can be, planning the future, we never really know what the future holds. And if we look back--at my outdoor faucets, for instance--we see that our batting average for forecasting the future is rather low.

We think if we know the future, we can calm our fears. But this is a deceiving assumption.

Calm lies in the present moment, which is really the only place we ever are.

Trying to Stop Transplanting

Transplanting season is over. The weather forecast predicts temperatures warming to hot with no rain for a week.

Not that the hot weather stops me from transplanting and crossing my fingers that the plants will survive.

What i should do is transplant with a shovel in one hand and the hose in the other. The trouble is my designing/artistic mind gets way ahead of my maintaining body-mind.

In this weather, a good daily sprinkling of the transplants would help establish them in their new homes. This means dragging the hose around, disconnecting hoses, reconnecting hoses and the sprinkler, traipsing back to the spigot to turn it on (or off).

Do you hear the suffering/stress/WORK associated with that first pleasant idea of transplanting the Sweet Williams out of their nursery bed and into a flower bed?

Fortunately nights are still cool--in the 50s--and the dew still falls, so the transplants have an easy night.

And after transplanting maidenhair ferns along the woodland paths (read: thick network of roots interpenetrating the thin, dry, rocky woods dirt), i too fall asleep easily.