Thursday, September 18, 2014

Inspiring blog post titles & random ramblings on

I read a title to a post the other day, and without reading the actual post, the title just fits where we are at these days: When the dream comes true but the reality is slow and ugly. I mean, wow. So fitting. Not in any particular way I can describe, but it is exactly how I am feeling about our present. Although of course I might use different/stronger language to describe the reality than 'slow and ugly'. (stupid and stressful? irritating and heartbreaking? you get the point!)

Regardless, we are moving on from the fires and the debris flows/floods. Moving on from the bummer summer. Moving into fall, keeping our fingers crossed for light gentle fall rains, for a snowpack that doesn't melt all at once, for spring regrowth that quickly starts holding the soil together. Looking forward to snow and the peace and calm and quiet that falling snow lends to our landscape.

We haven't decided what to do with the gardens yet. The lower garden got scraped off, but I couldn't bear to put the energy into it to rake, hang fences back up, and seed a fall cover crop. I just didn't want to sink myself back into it not knowing what even the rest of the fall would look like. Not knowing if we would decide to start a garden elsewhere (but where?) next spring, or wait a year to see if the majority of the debris/dirt/rocks were down from that chute. The side garden we will likely keep going next summer. It is big enough that apart from the soil being much poorer than what the lower garden had, and the weed bank being MUCH larger, we should be able to plant everything we want in it.

It is funny, initially when we started the side garden, I imagined letting the lower garden go back to grass, to pasture, so maybe this will end up happening after all. After all, the side garden is much easier to defend from future debris flows, compared to the lower garden, where defending means putting up a berm to keep the debris flow material on our neighbors property, where the flow originated from. They aren't the friendliest of neighbors even now, and I imagine that could send them over the edge into certifiably crazy.

And if we do pigs (currently dependent upon the irrigation for our little valley being repaired which isn't looking all that good) next summer they will be on the east side of the property, about where we had the pig the first year. They are just too smelly to have in the garden, beside the play structure. Besides, we have plans down the road to have a little patio type area in the garden, which definitely means no smelly pigs along side! We'll just have to haul the manure across every fall I expect, which is quite worth it to have the smell and the flies on the downwind side (most of the year) of the house.

Anyway, that is our little update here!
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