I haven’t been paying attention much to the garden. Occasionally I will realize I’ve fallen behind and spend a couple of hours weeding and planting seeds to get caught up. But the garden often just looks like a bunch of projects that I don’t have time for. So today is a celebration of what I have done and what is going well in the garden. No pictures of piles that need to be dealt with, noxious weeds to pull, or projects that I want to do later.

Chickens are just fun. Except when I found one of them dead in the coop. No apparent cause, just very disturbing. At least we never really decided on a name for her.

My little clover patch is still doing great, even without any irrigation. I’m sure once we get the water turn and start irrigating it a bit more it will start to grow even more. Usually it probably would be fine, but this spring has been dry minus one sporadic snow storm.

The sheet mulch in the front yard is still great. (Not the picture. I lost one of my cameras and the one I used for this photo has a scratched lens.) No weeds. It is probably the closest I could get to no maintenance. It has been the one method I throw at everyone and is my current answer to everyone’s frustrations of garden. Hate the weeds? Sheet mulch. Don’t have time or money? Sheet mulch.

This is my current experiment. The peas and lettuce were planted purposely. And then I threw down a lot of seed for all the other spring crops I wanted, just sprinkled it everywhere all together. The plan is to thin it out as it starts to grow and eat what I thin as sprouts.

It’s starting to come up, so I should get at least something here.

The cover crop on the swales/hugel mounds is doing well. In just a few weeds I’ll chop and drop and plant my summer crops here.

I’ve got a lot of biennials that are starting to flower–kale, onions, and parsley. It’s not usual to let any of these plant keep going until they flower, but they all overwintered for me well. I’ve started planting flowers and herbs to take over when these guys are done.

My sister and I were cooking together in the kitchen and she asked where all my spices were. They were thrown in the pantry, not very organized or convenient.  We started to talk about where to put spices in the kitchen,  I mentioned that I wanted to put them over the stove in spice racks and I actually even had the shelves and had for months.

When we moved here, we inherited a lot of ancient junk. Most of it was just junk, but there were a few fun finds. They included a couple of small shelves that I held onto even though my husband tried to throw them away twice. I had a vision for them. With a coat of paint and a couple of nails, they would be awesome spice racks.

Almost a year later, I finally got them painted and hung up. And then a couple of months after that I actually got jars that fit them. Little things like these spice racks are why it is fun to buy an old house, even if it has tons of junk to go through and a never ending list of projects to work on.

When I was in an eight grade art class, I remember a conversation I had with some of my friends. Our teacher was absent at the time, and many of my friends were discussing the various faults of the missing teacher. I countered and said I didn’t mind her. My friend answered, in almost a derogatory way, “Well you don’t hate anything.”  I didn’t quite know what to think then. The comment has stuck with me for twelve years and I’ve thought about it during that time. I now consider it one of the best compliments I have ever received.

Lately it is a philosophy I am striving to live by. During the past year, I have become engaged in the world of permaculture and self-sufficiency. I love the goals and ethics of the movements, but I never agree with everything that is said and written. I simply ignore the negative motions against practices, companies and people. There is a lot of bashing in the world from people convinced that other corporations and practices are evil and worth fighting against. I believe that there is only one thing worth fighting against, one main evil and that is the devil, Satan or whatever word you choose to use. There is real evil out there: people knowingly hurting others and committing crimes. That is worth fighting against.

But there is a lot of fighting against things that are not purely evil like oil corporations, pesticide companies, and non-organic practices. I’m not lending my voice. I’m not going to start hating people who are trying to live the best they can even if it doesn’t match my ideals. I not going to hate practices and companies that aren’t perfect and might be flawed but still aren’t blatantly bad.

Instead I choose to focus on positive solutions, on better ways to do things, of striving to just get a little better. Instead of despising pesticides, I find ways to garden where I don’t feel like I need them. Instead of trying to close down businesses, I try to support good companies and causes I care about. I view things on a spectrum: there are certainly better ways of doing things, but just because something isn’t the best doesn’t make it bad.

Hating and fighting against things that aren’t evil but simply not the best isn’t worth any effort. Instead I choose to live the best I can at this moment and to support the best I can find.

Our main area lacks overhead lighting. I have never wanted to put floor lamps in there because in my experience, floor lamps and young children don’t combine well. When we moved in, I bought a couple of wall lamps from IKEA. Because they were wall mounted, they didn’t take up any extra space, and the kids couldn’t knock them over. My mom also lent me a lamp that had been sitting in her storage for 25 years: an old hanging globe lamp.

Here’s aside story with that lamp. Last year I was setting up the Christmas tree and the stupid lamp was in the way. I took a step back to analyze the situation and figured out that the lamp would work perfectly as the topper to the tree.

We’ve had the three lamps since we moved in a year ago and recently I decided they weren’t good enough. I wanted more light, and something I could turn on as soon as I walked into the room. (All of the lamps were on the opposite wall, necessasitating crossing the room in the dark to turn them on.) My husband and I started talking about what we could do. Putting in an overhead was a bit of a hassle since the attic bedroom is finished. I thought about putting up a fixture on the wall that was devoid of lights, and went online looking at options, but couldn’t really find anything. I was still opposed to floor lamps, but then realized that we could put a lamp on the shelf. So then we looked online for lamps that would work. We had been talking and looking at different options for a long time, when my husband asked why we didn’t just use the extra lamp downstairs. I had forgotten we had it. It worked great for what we needed it for.

It took five minutes to solve a problem I puzzled over for an hour. The first place I should have looked for a solution was in my own house, not just adding on more junk. The best solutions are inexpensive, easy and quick, and they are often found by just evaluating what we have, not wanting more.