Gardening (and writing about it) for pleasure

If I've been a bit lax in my posts here, it's because I'm channeling most of my energy into my garden, and its subsequent chronicles at http://gardenofgaladriel.blogspot.com/.  It's focused on my gardening exploits, methods and philosophy--with a strong emphasis on food production.  I don't write much about myself or my family there:  it's all garden.

Still, I find it very therapeutic to document my successes and failures in the garden.  Well, maybe not too many failures!  But I sometimes almost feel a compulsion to write, and get it out of my system.  I don't think I have very many readers at all (and I think my only reader here on this blog is Partner), but I don't mind;  I'm not really writing for an audience, but for my own state of mind.  I'm passionate about gardening (maybe even obsessive?) and that blog is an outlet for me.

This blog?  I have written about my garden here in the past, but I've moved away from that in the past few years.  I suppose that is part of why I'm not updating here so often;  my creativity has become diluted without the garden.  What else do I have to write about?

I'm living my life, day by day;  going to work, keeping up the house daily, working on small projects like my knitting, or slightly bigger ones such as redecorating.  Many days are similar, and perhaps boring to read about--although I'm not bored living them.  I find a great deal of satisfaction in raising F, running the household, making and crafting, and putting meals on the table from good (homegrown, of course) food.

One year on

It's been a year since our baby boy Teddy was born and died.  I'm not in shock any more, and rarely start crying suddenly.  I've heard people say it gets easier with time;  maybe this is true for some people.  The grief I have is still just as extreme:  it's just easier to compartmentalize.  I can stick it in a box now, instead of being helplessly overwhelmed.

That said, some things are more painful now:  I'm sensitive to death at the moment, for instance.  Our young rooster died suddenly a little while ago, and I found his still warm body under a tree.  I grabbed him, warm and soft, and held him on my lap, doing chest compressions for ten minutes at least, desperate to get him breathing again.  It was no good though:  he was gone.  That was really hard.

Still, nearly all my days are good and I can focus on the positive.  It's easier to do this now in summer than it was in the dark, cold winter.  In the first few months after Teddy's death, I was able to keep busy out in the garden, and with household projects.  When it got too cold and rainy/snowy for outdoor work (from about November to April), I felt a bit lost.  Going back to work in February was initially tough, but helped me get through the last of the winter.

I've put a lot of work into my garden over the past year, and it really shows now.  We're eating loads of vegetables, including the last of the broad beans, plenty of peas, lettuce, carrots, turnips and chard--and there's lots more things to come.  We're picking plenty of berries, and are just finishing the sweet cherries (pie cherries finished a week ago).  We have four new season chicks bred from, hatched and raised by our own chickens. 

I think about Teddy every day, mostly happy and not too many sad thoughts;  as I wrote previously, I have no regrets about the choices we made and for that I'm grateful.