2002-01-22-2:28 p.m.

There are two things that I can lose myself in. One is music and the other is gardening.

I went out to the garden yesterday and cleaned it up a little. I raked a bunch of the dead plants and grass and leaves into a pile in the middle of the bad side. The bad side is on the left. It doesn't really have any good dirt except for what I put in there with the wheelbarrow last year. It's mostly caliche and just has a thin layer of dirt on top. I added good dirt to all the squares around the middle, but not IN the middle, so I decided the middle would be the compost pile this year.

I pulled up all the old tomato cages and put them outside the fence. I'll use them again this year. One of the most fun things about having a garden is seeing if you can use things you already have instead of buying new things. This will be probably the fourth year for some of those tomato cages and they look like it, too! They're pretty sad looking, but they'll still work. I make pathways from bricks that were here when we moved in and odd pieces of wood I find in the garage. An old curtain rod holds the fence straight in one place where it was sagging. I'm going to use seeds from last year, too, just to see if it will work.

The outside of the fence gets pretty overgrown with wild things during the summer and fall after I've abandoned the garden. I went around to the back and pulled weeds out of the fence and stomped them down, and I put Roundup on the grass that's growing through the front and the side. I'll wait until it dies and then go dig it up. I want to grow flowers all along the front of the garden and it's hard when the Saint Augustine has such a stranglehold.

Some shasta daisies survived the heat and the drought and the grasshoppers and being neglected all summer! I'll have to plant some more, but it's nice to have a little head start. I asked Daniel if he wants to have sunflowers again and he said yes. He planted sunflowers in every little bare patch of dirt he could find last year! Every time I went out there I saw another sunflower coming up. I meant to take pictures of him standing next to his giant sunflower last year, but I kept putting it off and sunflowers don't last forever.

I'll wait until the Roundup seems to be working and then go out there and run the hose for an hour or two to get the ground soft and then the next day I can dig. I love to dig! It's hard, but when you're finished you can see that you've done something and your muscles are sore and you feel that good tiredness and you can sleep. And dirt's fun and pretty fascinating when you think about it. If you look closely at it you can see the little tiny pieces that it's made from. It's not microscopic or anything. And when you pick up a few billion of those little pieces in your shovel, it's real heavy and solid, a neat thing. It's funny to think of the garden as just a whole bunch of little particles. I guess dirt never loses its charm. If you liked to dig when you were little then you probably like to dig when you're not little anymore. I still remember digging swimming pools for my Barbies and making complicated roads for trucks in the flower bed that never had any flowers in it.

Another thing I had to clean up is the old morning glory vines. We've got these wild morning glories that are so pretty! I let them have free rein the last two years because I liked them so much, but they got so heavy they started pulling the fence down and they overwhelmed some of the other flowers and made shade on the green beans, so this year I'll have to keep them cut back or just pull them up. I hate to do that.

Well. I told you I could get lost in gardening.

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