Ramblings in the garden on a "feel bad" day

It is one of those days when I just don't feel good--exhausted, achy, listless. I feel "heavy" and just want to sleep. Not too long ago I felt this way nine days out of ten. In March my doctor put me on a bunch of vitamin and mineral supplements to support the adrenal glands. They must be doing something, because since the end of May I have been tending to have more good days than bad days.

On these days when I just don't feel good, I try to keep going, and get something accomplished, even if it is something very simple, like washing the dishes, folding laundry, pulling a few weeds. Giving in to my deep desire to sleep just makes me feel worse and sets off a vicious cycle. Trust me I know. I spent most of last summer, fall, and winter sleeping. It didn't make me feel any better. I would wake up even more tired and just want to sleep some more. I would get depressed because I felt so awful and wasn't doing anything. My garden was full of weeds, my house was a mess. This spring and summer, I have been doing better on the days when I feel exhausted. I know rest does not help the situation. At least if I get up and do something, I feel better about myself, and my garden and house look better, even if I don't feel better physically.

So today I started by weeding the front flower garden. Usually by this time every year, the front flower garden is a weedy, dried up mess. Now that it is actually mine, I determined to keep it looking pretty after the bulbs were done blooming. For the most part, I'm doing that. The wintersown marigolds and zinnias are blooming full force right now. I'm so thankful for wintersowning...if I had bought these plants they would have cost me at least $150...and probably more (the four flats of impatients that I put in the little garden by the garage cost $75). The garden is pretty right now, but it is lacking definition. It needs something bold to help it make a statement. What exactly it needs, I'm not sure. It is a challenging place to garden.

There is a tree on the far end (sorry, you can't see it in these pictures), so one side is really shady, and as a result the ground is usually dry. The end in this picture is right next to a dirt road (like two feet away), and gets really hot, dusty, and dry. On some summer days you drive down our street and all the bushes and bushes and plants are covered with a thick coating of dust. Not the most conducive thing in the world to growing a lovely flower garden. If anyone has bright ideas for redesigning this flower garden, let me know. I'm open to suggestions. By the way, it is a very petty bulb garden in the spring. I just need to figure out what annuals and perennials will grow best and look best in it once the bulbs are done.

Here is a shot of what it looked like this spring. I so love white daffodils with grape hyacinths!

Then I went out and pulled the garlic. Harvesting garlic is a nostalgic task for me. We always grew several 100 foot rows of it on my parents farm. Harvesting it was an all day event that involved all my brothers and sisters. It started with harnessing the horse and hauling many 5 gallon buckets of water out to garlic beds. Then we would work as team--someone would pull garlic, someone would wash it, someone would trim the roots, someone would bundle it, then at the end of the day, it would all be loaded on the stone boat and be hauled to to barn to be hung up to dry. We ate pounds of garlic and sold some it. The smell of garlic is comforting to me.

I love growing garlic! It gets planted in the fall...here in Michigan I've been planting it about the first of September, but we would plant it in August in upstate New York. It will start growing and get its roots ready for the next year. In late fall we cover it with a thick mulching of leaves to prevent it from deep freezing. It is very important to get those leaves off first thing in the spring so the garlic plants don't suffocate! This is what my garlic patch looked like on April 8th this year.
Garlic is pretty finicky about what type of soil it grows in it. It needs to be light and rich. I always add sand and lots of compost to my garlic beds. One thing I love about it is that it doesn't mind being grown close to my pesky black walnut tree that kills most vegetables that I plant near it.

I sure got a nice garlic harvest this year! There are some really nice big bulbs. I wish I could bundle and hang my garlic to dry like we did on the homestead. I don't have a good place to hang it. The basement is too damp and the garage---well I don't think Terry would put up with garlic hanging among his tools. So I just snipped the bulbs off and laid them out to dry on newspaper on the kitchen table. Of course, now the whole house is strongly perfumed by the scent of garlic! I'll leave it there and let the wrappers dry for about a week, then I will sort it into planting garlic and eating garlic. The biggest, plumpest cloves will be planted in September, and the rest will get stored in a basket in the pantry in the basement. Garlic keeps about 10 months in good eating condition if kept in a cool dry place. It starts to dry out or sprout after that, but can still be planted. I usually take my left over garlic from last year and plant it really close together to get some small bulbs for when I just want one little clove for a personal salad or something.

My garlic harvest all laid out and ready to be washed and trimmed.