Welcome to Spring, Kinda
Yesterday I took part of the afternoon to put potting soil in a bunch of containers and seed trays.
And today, this:
I know it will melt quickly but still, it feels like one of those not-as-funny-as-someone-thinks April Fool’s day pranks.
So — real talk — I really, really, really hate container gardening. Direct sow is more my jam; crops are supposed to start their life as seeds strewn carelessly into the ground via spray and pray. It’s a wonderful, loose, process — improvised and unfussy, the ‘jazz’ of homesteading. It works because it’s done at a larger scale, and losing a plant here and there is fine and expected. With containers you feel every loss — shame in each dirt-filled pot.
But, I’m sucking it up and dumping expensive purchased soil into containers because skipping the 2021 growing season entirely seems too sad to bear, and I’m nothing if not good at pivots. Besides, it’s better than the labor debt of pounding t-posts for fencing we’d eventually have to dig out later. Thus the forested land can remain the domain of our small chicken flock and our ever-barking Great Pyr, and the deck can be modular plant central. Well, when all this melts.
I do eventually want to plant some blueberry bushes here; I feel about fruit trees and berry bushes the way other girls feel about roses. I’d probably raze the front yard for an orchard if it was up to me, but given that this is a shared family cabin I’ll stick to some foundation plantings. I also need to figure out a DIY way to protect them from my free-roving band of chickens. There are hawks here but I’ve given up on a fort knox style chicken run and instead let them roam freely around the yard and woods. It makes them happy, and since they are all on borrowed time thanks to Marek’s disease I’ve gotten looser with their protections.
(Expect a fun post later titled something like: “All My Birds are Sick and Other Depressing Homesteading Stories”)
In more positive news, TV has been both plentiful and watchable. I finally sucked Cody into vintage episodes of Roseanne on COZI and now he is fully emotionally invested in the classic Becky-Runs-Away-From-Home plot.
As a young'un I of course identified with cynical and wild-haired Darlene, but these days my heart lies with Becky. Oh, Becky. She was a good kid. She did everything right. And despite everything it all went to pot — no money, no college, no future.
I’m speaking specifically of the episode ‘Aliens’, where Becky learns that her parents have spent her college fund to pay bills while their business goes under. Post miscarriage, I cry at most everything remotely emotional on TV, including Forrest Gump and commercials for family owned, multi generational pizza shops, but I stand behind my tears in this case: it’s objectively a sad, great scene. Part of me sees shades of Maisel or Lorelei here, and I wonder if Amy Sherman maybe had a hand in the writing (she got her start in the Roseanne writer’s room).
(Fun Gilmore Girls gossip I half-remember hearing: Paris Gellar’s reign as editor of the Yale Daily News was based on the crazy megalomania of the Roseanne, drawn from Sherman’s personal experience.)
I’ll keep hitting the COZI TV hard for blog fodder, which isn’t hard because we’ve been deep in a casual laundry-folding rewatch of The Nanny. I am of course obsessed with Fran’s fashion, as we all should be. In a different, pandemic-free world I’d probably already be planning a Fran and Mr. Sheffield couples Halloween Costume. Who knows — maybe we’ll be there come October. In the meantime, a girl can dream.
Obligatory instagram share for Franspiration: https://www.instagram.com/whatfranwore/
Originally published at http://thelowercrust.com on April 2, 2021.
