Too Much of a Good Thing

I finally managed to overwhelm the Thursday evening meeting of Perennial Swappers. I took a triple-decker truckload of plants and came home with merely a truckload.

Now i'm going to overwhelm my "add-to" compost bin that has already reached the top.

Too much of a good thing shows us yet another angle on how the pleasant can become unpleasant. Perennial Swappers is a fun meeting where gardeners can give away whatever they have too much of. Last evening everyone filled their buckets and bags, their trunks and station wagons. The first-timer new gardener went home with enough to keep her busy this holiday weekend.

New plants = pleasant
Free new plants = pleasant
Too many plants = a lot of work = unpleasant
For me, too many plants = a lot of hauling = unpleasant

After Perennial Swappers, i stopped at a friend's house.
"I need a plant for this area," she said, pointing to a little patch of shady bare earth.
"I've got something for you," i said, leading her to my truck, laden with pre-compost plants. "Here. Have a Pulmonaria," i said with a smile.

One more plant shared with a friend = pleasant.

Flowers in the Onions

When i planted onions in my community garden plot, i improved the soil by adding compost. Now this particular compost came from my home vegetable garden, which is surrounded by strip beds of annual flowers for cutting.

So, most of the "weeds" that are growing in my onions are flowers :) So far, i've dug out 8 dozen Nicotiana and 1 dozen Verbascum (a sweet perennial mullein that is only 2 feet tall.) I haven't had the heart to weed out Cleome, Nigella, Chinese forget-me-not (Cynoglossum), or the opium poppy that is about to bloom.

This serendipitous interplanting of flowers among the onions is an example of the pleasant (volunteer flowers) becoming unpleasant (potentially shading out the onions that prefer clear ground.)

In our daily lives, we might prefer sweet-smelling Nicotiana to stinky onions, but when it comes to cooking, we prefer onions to tobacco.

So we look at the long-term benefit. Things that are pleasant now--flowers--lead to later unpleasantness--a poor harvest of onions. Things that are stinky now (e.g., renouncing a bad habit) turn out to nourish and sustain us.

For the time being, i'm trying to have both flowers and onions, but i have to separate them. And soon.

Russian Red Kale

Russian red kale has volunteered in the vegetable garden, and it looks so much stronger than the Russian red that i started from seed, which is about salad/mesclun size. Now i have twice the amount of kale i expected. (So send me your kale recipes!)

Last year, the Russian red emerged from winter growing tender young leaves on the thick old brown stalks of the previous year (that i had not pulled up and cleaned up out of the garden.) I kept cutting the tender kale, which became usual-sized in the summer, and eventually flowered and went to seed. I have to say i was surprised this spring to see kale growing in my onion patch and 20 feet away in the cucumber patch.

No matter what age we are, we can harvest the fruits (or vegetables :) of our meditation practice. Our practice can grow lovely, delicious small insights. (e.g., "I'm going to hold my tongue for a minute right now.") Our practice can sustain us. And occasionally we may find new insights sprouting in our lives.

In these ways, we harvest our practice. And the people around us also reap the benefits of our moment of calm in the midst of the tempest of daily life.

The Happiness of Pansies

The pansies in a pot on my front step are looking rather bedraggled now. After 5 days of rain, summer heat has arrived, and the cool-weather pansies have their tongues hanging out.

In April, i depend on pansies for a spot of color, and they bloom sweetly all the way through May, but now, they are leggy and lost in the lushness of June.

In April, the pansies' smiling faces make me so happy. Now i barely notice them, and when i do, i frown at their deadheads and long-legs. That which was pleasant becomes unpleasant.

Where does true happiness reside?
Are we content with the perpetual chase for pleasantness?
Does pleasantness = happiness?

The pansies and the outer world are in a constant state of flux. Our happiness cannot depend on ever-changing outer conditions, which shift from pleasant to unpleasant and back again moment to moment.

Happiness lies inside us when we see and accept things as they really are. Pansies blossom and die. Can we find our peace of mind right there?

Strawberry Shortcake

It's strawberry season here in the North Country, and Saturday night, we went to a strawberry shortcake dinner at the nearby church.

The summer menu of potato salad, macaroni salad, cole slaw, and cold ham was just a prelude to the main attraction: a layered shortcake with strawberries and whipped cream between the layers and dolloped generously on top.

Tables of 8 were served family-style with a platter of strawberry layered-shortcake. The server cut the confection into 8 pieces before our eyes, while an electric beater whirring in the background whipped up more cream for the next strawberry construction that would go to some other table of 8.

Strawberries: pleasant
Whipped cream: pleasant
Shortcake: pleasant (Believe you me, the church women have this recipe perfected!)

Savoring each pleasant bite and pouring leftover strawberry juice from the empty platter on top of my shortcake, i soaked it from its buttercream color to pink-red.

Pleasant. Pleasant. Pleasant.
And then, even though more remained on my plate: unpleasant.

I picked out the 3 remaining strawberries and popped them in my mouth: pleasant to the tongue, but unpleasant to the stomach.
A soggy pink tennis-ball-sized piece of shortcake remained on my plate: unpleasant.

Pleasant becomes unpleasant. Amazing, isn't it?

5 minutes ago, we thought our happiness depended on strawberry shortcake. Now that self-same dessert makes us unhappy.

Where DOES happiness truly reside?

Maybe we'll go pick a flat of strawberries this afternoon :)

Pleasant AND Unpleasant

On Friday, i attended the North Hill Garden Symposium: 200 people sitting on plastic folding chairs under a tent in a 55-degree drizzle.

The conditions were uncomfortable, but the speakers were brilliant. The 4 very best nurseries in the state had a selection of their rare wares for sale; the plants were unusual and otherwise unfindable. I sat beside the editor of Country Gardens magazine.

Pleasant: the speakers, the plants, the food
Unpleasant: the chill, the wet, and the hard chairs

If you are a person who focuses on the pleasant, you would have had a wonderful time chatting with luminaries of the gardening world.

If you are a person who focuses on the unpleasant, you would have complained about the weather and your lack of warm clothing while sitting still for 2 hours in the morning and another 2 hours in the afternoon.

The type of personality that chases the pleasant is called "greedy," because they crave the next pleasant experience. The type of personality that pushes the unpleasant away is called "aversive," because they want the unpleasant to end. Right now.

Which one do you resonate to?
And which type do you think i am? (Hint: re-read the first sentence.)

(If you don't know, then you may fall into the third category: Delusional.)

The Tire Retaining Wall

When i moved in to my house 31 years ago, i had more energy and time than i had money, so i built a retaining wall out of tires to hold back my east hillside. Tires? Over the years they have been covered by creeping thyme and, more recently, sedum.

Yesterday i started taking the wall of tires apart to make way for some stonework. Change comes hard for the other person in my household. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," he says.

I see the homemade quality of the tires, which look generally good, but sloppy in the detail work. I look ahead to the time when our aging bodies will need to move out of a 3-story house into one level. I do think a stone retaining wall will sell better than a tire wall.

The garden changes from day to day. That east hillside flowerbed is now bare earth, and the retaining wall is in the middle of being deconstructed so that a reconstruction can begin.

Impermanence.

And after wrestling sand-filled tires out of the dirt for a couple of hours, and bouncing the sand out of them, i am tire-d!