Chipmunks in the Stone Wall

I have a little garden bed right in front of a stone wall. When the wall was first built a few years ago, i thought the little south-facing bed would be perfect for hot weather crops such as peppers and eggplants. It turns out the stone wall is a perfect home for chipmunks, and chipmunks eat pepper plants.

For the past three or four years, i've tried putting milk carton "collars" around the pepper plants with mixed success (read: many failures).

Oh, how many times do i fight the current of Life, trying to row in the direction I want to go.

This summer, i give up. I surrender my garden bed to the chipmunks. After all, i do enjoy watching them dash and dart here and there.

I'm planting Russian sage in this hot spot of a micro-climate. The peppers and eggplants are going somewhere else--farther away from the home of the chipmunks.

Late Harvest

photo from www.quickcrop.ie

We are leaving for vacation tomorrow, which means giving all the vegetables in the refrigerator away. Finding a home for the red peppers was easy. I sun-dried one rack of Sungold cherry tomatoes. I decided to keep my 6 red cabbage, ranging in size from small to smallest.

In order not to have any leftovers, i cooked up the smallest cabbage tonight with some homegrown onions and the only remaining apple. Delicious.

When it comes to the end of our own season, we will be harvesting the mind we've been training all these years. The untrained mind may be unpredictable. The trained mind, the mind accustomed to mindfulness, has a much better chance of viewing the ending of the season of the life more calmly.

The seasons change.

12 Fruits and Vegetables You Really Should Buy Organic

According to Andrew Weil, there are 12 fruits and vegetables you really should buy organic, due to the heavy pesticide loads these non-organic produce carry:

• Apples
• Strawberries
• Grapes
• Celery
• Peaches
• Spinach
• Sweet bell peppers
• Nectarines (imported)
• Cucumbers
• Cherry tomatoes
• Snap peas (imported)
• Potatoes

 No matter how much you wash these vegetables, you can't wash the pesticides out of them. And when you start thinking about potatoes--potato chips, french fries, hash browns--just how much pesticide do you want to eat?

Saying "No" to big beautiful California strawberries is not easy. Our sensual desire overwhelms us and whispers delicious rationalizations into our ears. We suddenly want to treat ourselves; we don't want to deprive ourselves of a big, beautiful, pesticide strawberry.

Sensual desire hinders our meditation and hinders our best intentions. But we want to see things as they really are. Look closely. And look again. Feel desire in your body.

You may be saving money by buying non-organic, but you are spending your health, your immune system, your very body.

Black Plastic Pros & Cons

Carole laid down black plastic in her vegetable garden to absorb and increase the heat in the soil for her peppers and tomatoes as well as to suppress the weeds. Now, a tribe of voles has taken up residence under the black plastic, and are pruning every plant in sight. Not only the broccoli and the beans, but also the peppers, including the hot peppers. (I wonder if the leaves and stems are as hot as the peppers?)

 We too lay down various forms of weedy thought suppression: Oh, i shouldn't think that or Oh, i shouldn't feel that way or I don't want to feel this painful feeling.

We try to grow nice-ness as our cover crop. And what happens? When we're not looking, our best efforts are nibbled away, undermined by the very feeling/thought we are trying to suppress.

Mindfulness is our refuge. Lean into that unpleasant feeling as if it's an acupressure point. Make friends with that unpleasant thought/feeling.

That's the way to grow a garden. Pepper your life with mindfulness.

End of a Season

Peppers and eggplant like it hot. Now that cool weather has arrived with refrigerator nights, the peppers simply hang on their bushes. Many have turned red, thanks to the length of the season. Eggplants are small, and it's tempting to think they will continue to grow in size--but highly unlikely. Having seen marble-sized eggplant in Thailand, i pick even the thumb-size eggplants, knowing i can cook something with them.

This season reminds me of the end of my parents' lives. I couldn't imagine life leaving them, yet life was definitely waning. No medical intervention could stop that downhill slide.

No amount of hope can reverse the path of the sun as daylight slides into darkness earlier every day.

Peppers Like It Hot

Returning from a hot vacation in the Southwest, i go out to the vegetable garden and find a dozen red peppers and another dozen somewhere on the green-yellow-red spectrum. In a northern garden, such as mine, i treasure red peppers. With a short growing season, green peppers are a cinch, but orange, yellow, purple or red are chancy because peppers like it hot. And this summer has been hot.

Given the proper conditions, our meditation practice will also ripen in time, and we can harvest the fruits (or vegetables) of a spiritual life.

The question is: How long is our growing season?

Since we don't really know when the frost will fall on our own life, the time to meditate is now.