return of the… king (lion? Aragorn?)

This wasn’t the post I intended to do as my first one after almost a 4-year absence, but hey, I’m nothing if not sporadic.

Honestly for a long time there, I just lost the drive to write. The world felt chaotic and life changed so much. I’ve always been sensitive to undertones of emotions and the constant displays of anger and fear really plagued me. So I stopped writing and withdrew into myself. I’ll chalk it up to general stress from the world in regards to COVID-19, and various shifts in life due to parenting (now 2) small beings.

When I left off blogging- I did not transform behind the scenes into one of those people that picked up a new hobby during COVID. I’m not now a proud brewer, woodworker, bread maker, knitter, or in anyway selling my work as a hobby-turned-hustle. I didn’t get mega fit (quite the contrary actually) nor do I have anything really fun to show at all during this time away. I mostly just tended to the garden (now at our new house) and girls (we had another daughter; no not because of boredom or COVID cabin fever- we just wanted F to have a sibling). I’d say any change that happened to me during the beginning moments of COVID were all internal. Lots of culminating thoughts and rumination and experimentations that will be revealed as the months progress.

Whether I always was in some dormant space, or it’s new from burning out of trying to live normally when my immune system is easily triggered, or maybe from having kids and freaking out about the world they will be inheriting, I started to express more and more old soul behaviors. Rarely did I want to go out to places with lots of lights at night or people around. I preferred to sit on a quiet deck staring at stars and drinking tea (or perhaps, if it was a special weekend and someone was visiting, an herbal gin and tonic). That was nice for a while but after a while I started to crave the outside world again. I am still much more of a community/village person.

Life has reemerged at the pace of a hermit crab tentatively emerging from its shell, all creepy legs aplomb. At some point I decided I needed to get out of the house and make a genuine human connection, not just over small talk at grocery store checkout line, or after library story hours. I wanted to have a purpose with the outside world again as I felt alone and trapped, stuck alone in my head. I am not, and have never been a house person. One such way to reconnect with the world is this blog. So let’s rekindle this blog feel as it was before. Please hold while I look at old blog posts because I literally can’t remember…

-insert dial tone here-

Okay, got it! Literally anything.

So how bout that environment, huh? It’s interesting how much more the world is into talking about the environment, for good or bad. It’s hard not to given how many weather patterns are just bananas this year. We got swarms of pests killing our plants and trees, we’ve got wildfires year round, we’ve got droughts in non-drought-y places, and my personal favorite small scale nightmare: sinkholes.

All joking aside, environmental things have been on my mind aggressively these last five years. I guess having kids opened that door, and then watching the world change really rammed the point home. So to assuage my creeping fear of the future, I applied to and started a fellowship with a local compost company this past June. At the time of first drafting this post, I was one day away from my last day. As usual the experience sent me down a rabbit hole of ideas. I got state certified as a compost facility operator through the Maryland Department of Agriculture, I passed a backyard composting course held by University of Vermont Extension Master Composter program, and I’m working to complete the community composting 101 course through the Institution of Local Self-Reliance. Now I’ve begun to volunteer with a non-profit that works on building school compost curricula and disseminating any and all compost information to the public. And yet, I always question why I do anything if I cant make it a career, which is a very broken part of me. I don’t want everything to be a side hustle to career, but that’s how my mind works. I do have this long-term dream that I’m chipping away at but I’ll talk more about that when there are new developments.

I recently re-watched the movie “Away We Go” starring Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski, and it still hits just as hard as it did before. Different parts resonated more this time as I relate more to the couples with kids than the pregnant/pre-kid couple now, but it made me want to be like the Montreal college friend characters, trying to show up more and more to provide the love to their children as best as they can. It’s hard because I am physically present and available but my mind isn’t always. I am sort of like a dog breed that if I don’t get walked I get cagey, except instead of pacing around the house or becoming destructive to the environment caging me, my brain zooms around at a frenetic pace trying to learn everything and understand everything and I sort of shut down like a robot. I’ve always been a really deep daydreamer. I sometimes give myself the challenge to listen to one song all the way through without singing and I always find myself coming to and realizing I missed half the song with all my wildly escaping thoughts. It’s not surprising. For most of my young life I saw life as an adventure and was constantly enamored with the outside world as the stage for all excitement to come. Even today when I have dreams, if not outright horror from daytime anxieties, then they are anxiety-tinged survive-the-high-stakes situation type forays. And they are usually about escaping buildings to get back to the outdoors.

Honestly, the last few years were a bit of a blur. A lot changed, but I also recognize that I have really severe (postpartum?) anxiety, that sort of shunted a lot of my experience with motherhood into a survival situation. Throughout the fourth trimester with Fi, I was often an anxious wreck. Turns out, I do not like the responsibility of Maslow’s hierarchy (specifically food) over a being that cannot hold its head up. And I especially don’t like it if my infant was slow to gain weight, was apparently allergic to everything in formulas, and breastfed for probably 16 hours a day (or that’s how it felt). It’s no wonder I was obsessed with understanding the postpartum period and had obsessive interests in careers around motherhood, like doulas and IBCLCs. I survived that time period, obviously, but with more scars than I think I realized. I didn’t realize it until I dealt with normal child pickiness in my second child, how much I panic over them not eating, even when they aren’t hungry or are in weird growth spurts. They both are fine on their growth curves now, but it’s still a supremely triggering feeling to worry they won’t be eating enough to gain the weight to stay on track to what the medical practice embedded in me as being the safe range. I had talked to another mom who had a similar situation where her first was slow to gain weight and her second was a much bigger baby. She had warned me of how I would feel like a monster with how the pediatric doctors would treat me with a smaller baby, even if all other metrics look good (a happy, active infant who just is skinny). But knowing it would happen still didn’t help as I was going through it myself. Part of it was finding a pediatrician that worked with our family. That already was like night and day. And then when I finally had my second child, who was a bigger baby, everyone just got out of my way as my friend said they would. My second daughter just didn’t have colic (which in itself is a ubiquitously used term to explain away a whole host of things in the early months).

But anyway, I recognize how much these experiences messed up my way of thinking. I can vividly imagine the past generations of parents scolding a child when the child doesn’t want to eat the dinner made. The parent probably said something to the effect of “eat this or go to bed hungry”, whereas my kids choosing to not sometimes still sends me into mental spiral, as though I’m starving the girls and triggering those feelings I had in F’s early years. And this led to another obsession with trying to grow our own food because we learned from watching F, you can generally get a kid to eat vegetables if they can pick it themselves.

Which brings me to the other updates- in the time away from this blog we had a second child, and then proceeded to moved to a rural county that’s very sparse on human diversity, but has a lot of cows. Why did we move here in particular, you may be asking. Well, that desire to start growing our own food was a strong driver. You only have to watch the land development in Maryland and see how badly we tend to misuse soil, to feel a pang of some kind of environmental conscience. And sure it doesn’t help to read articles of soil scientists predicting a finite and rapidly decreasing amount topsoil left to make you want to DO something. Especially when you have the time, as I felt I did. This leads back to the daydreamer thing. If I don’t keep my body very active, my brain runs rampant instead. Tie that to a natural lifelong interesting in the human and more-than-human interface and you’ve got a deeply rooted, all-encompassing obsession, that with no outlet, becomes unhealthy. So we moved to try to satisfy some of that brain fervor (and to have a home that we could control rather than the one we rented with its bees in the vents, water damaged roof rot, electrical circuits of the kitchen tied to the uninsulated garage, and the bannisters being a Stephen King inspiration at the level of Desperation).

But, in pursuing a home, we looked for very specific things that have no barring 0n our full lived lives. We wanted a smaller house that was manageable with active children (check!), and didn’t require the use of a lot of stairs for daily life (check! We do have a basement but its for laundry and remote work). We wanted to have land to tend to (check!) and we wanted a no HOA place to avoid people fining us for our grass being too long (check!), and a slightly more spaced out area where everyday wasn’t a cacophony of landscaping services mowing tiny laws on industrial-sized mowers (check!).

What we didn’t factor in was what the land actually looked like (it was under a few inches of snow), such as where the boundaries are or we might have noticed a long driveway the length of the property on our west side, and maybeee remembered that we have small children. Or that the property, as a rolling hill style, has very few trees. Aka it requires hours of mowing so you need to buy a riding mower (or a really stupid stubborn will to not buy one and mow for half a day or more by hand… aka what we did).

To decrease the ridiculous amount of mowing and then be able to grow things that bring in the fireflies and butterflies and bees, we set out to kill the grass. I came in hot with aggressively specific guidelines. I really didn’t want to till or remove grass to start- I wanted to kill it off to let it become part of the organic matter layers of fertile soil. We were the first people in 50 years to not be fertilizing or spraying the shit out the property, and we’ve been able to see a surprisingly about of life return. And when I mean this property was manicured to a T, I mean when we didn’t continue the legacy of using herbicides, we began seeing dandelion return, but not just any. Oh no, we were getting two-faced dandelions and chonky stems aberrations- a condition called fasciation. Apparently fasciation is fairly rare, but we were seeing almost all of the emerging dandelions plagued with it, so I can only assume some of it was due to the the dramatic change in grass management.

Armed with our years (N=0) of experience converting lawns to food forests- we began mapping out where we’d want a garden and buying a ton of mulch to make it happen. It didn’t. Mulch is expensive, and the mowing nightmare became too much for us. Just tons of hindsight feelings of how we really should have planned it better. But one thing we learned is its incredibly hard to get anything done with an active 3-year old and a 4-month old that doesn’t go down for naps easily. That slowed our ability to do anything outside for well… the entire time we’ve lived here- ha!

Fast forward over all the stupid decisions. We are now almost 2 years into living here and have planted about 40 trees (mostly small, what I like to call, treelings), and had garden beds that we mostly let get overgrown with ubiquitous annuals like cucumbers and aggressive spreaders and survivors like mint and yarrow (and cosmos because my goodness, I love their silly little pink faces!). And finally, this past winter we made the financially depressing decision to put in a fence. The property is weird in that we have 5 neighbors touching the property. One house is behind ours to a corner, and its driveway runs the length of the property’s west side, as I mentioned before. Another neighbor behind half of our southern back side, and they too have a driveway bordering us. After watching cars speed down the west side driveway and seeing images of Stephen King’s inspiration for Pet Semetary running through my head, we caved and got a fence. We are using it as a resolution to make an oasis of the backyard. Gone is the pressure to mow or not throw down grass-smothering cardboard. We’ve set up the compost in unclosed bins and have mulch piles (that I got for free from work- another progression into doing things more in sustainable ways), piled up along our east side that the kids play in with tiny shovels. And I’m slowly amassing all the cardboard to finally remove half or more of the grass. Then comes the planting. We found that anise hyssop did well from seed, as did yarrow, mugwort, sunflowers, and cucumber. We like to stick towards native perennials as I am both lazy in carrying for high maintenance plants, and also want to plant plants that attract the diversity that makes outside life interesting.

We got the fence in the winter so there hasn’t been too much benefit from it, but on the not below 40 and freezing rain or crazy windy days, I’ve been getting those small fries outside more and am also able to do other things in the yard while they frolic, impeded from escaping now thanks to the fence. Well, I mean I just tell the now 5-year old not to leave, and luckily the 2-year old can’t reach the gate latch, and hasn’t tried to climb the fence… yet.

Now you may be asking how success we have been in growing food, and what are the plans for this coming growing season. We found ourselves at an impasse last year. J, who did the majority of mowing wanted much less grass, much faster, and I didn’t plan ahead as cautiously as I should have to focus on how grow over the spaces where we tried to kill the grass. And if we didn’t grow something… then the bermuda grass creeped in. Also turns out J hated the organically formed designed that grew from the card-boarding, but didn’t really make his mowing routes easier. I should probably mention now that was did NOT buy a riding mower, so he’s out there mowing it with a push mower for like 8 hours at a time and with our suped-up 50 years of fertilizer, that grass was back needing to be mowed every week just to be able to put cardboard down to make a bed. Actually this is why the fence has helped us, as I’m doing what I prefer and just cardboarding out from the fence to the center and planting trees that way, instead of having no external edges to work with. Less grass spaces for mowing means J is a happy camper.

But for the first two years of food growing, we played the messy garden game. We had crazy harvests of cucumbers and radishes (which I love to eat), and sunflowers (saved to replant throughout more of the yard). Peppers did decently, mints (catmint and peppermint and anise hyssop), by no surprise, take over. Our thyme is doing well and our second and third attempts at rosemary are thriving. The small hot peppers did well. The tomatoes we did not attend to and my mom harvested the string beans that we neglected. Grapes suffered a miserable life (we have Japanese beetles), and strawberries felt the full onslaught of rabbits (we have an interesting idea to prevent that next year).

This year we’re designing a rambling edge on the side with the driveway (and to block some of the spraying that neighbor does on her 6-foot long edge of grass), and turning the original garden into our leafy greens and cooking means closest to the house, and the rest of it as another pollinator garden (but more intentionally plantings than our meadow pollinator garden). Long term I will want to find a ton of bricks again, to finish the “floating island” garden spaces, but for now it will do.

I have pink trees on the brain (eastern redbuds) and cultivating a firefly haven for the girls to see (and the fireflies, of course), and want to increase the flowers known to draw in hummingbirds. I have specific species goals like I would love to create an environment that attracted and supported luna moths and rosy maple moths, but I imagine that will take more time.

In general we are going to try to finish planting the main branch (pun intended) of trees and then in future years be a bit more wild about it (dumping acorns, walnuts, etc into the tree beds along the perimeters just to see what takes). The food garden we want to focus on more perennials as well as a heavy focus on spring greens to see if we can get the littles eating more of them from a pick-your-own model. We want to try out currant tomatoes instead of the usual bigger species, and we want to really get our berry bushes growing (we have mulberries from the neighbor’s yard, and and a ton of blackberries that haven’t made fruit yet, and some raspberries that the rabbits kept eating down). We also want to grow many more sunflowers and harvest them for eating this year, and try out one type of grain (maybe amaranth, though oats grew well last year).