Broken & Hurting: The Reality Of Gardening & Life Isn’t Always Idyllic

Whoof. Every once in awhile, our gardens push us to the breaking point. The latter half of the garden season can be challenging to keep up with. Add in “real life” and it can definitely be a lot.

We do want you all to know that this social media gardening stuff makes it look easy. But, it isn’t like that, at all. We’re hustling here, sometimes barely keeping up. Let’s maybe just go through the last few days as an example.

Our weekend was completely blown with other project work, we put in some good 14+ hour days of labor over the weekend that completely brought us to our knees. So, we pushed our big community garden’s fertilization to Monday. Well, we got there and realized we had forgotten everything we needed for that. Something about “preparation required.” Fortunately, though, we stumbled upon our broccoli wanting to imminently flower on us. So, we emergency harvested that and not a moment too soon.

Unexpectedly, our schedule then changed to preserving all of that broccoli Monday night. You might “think” that refrigerating broccoli will keep it from flowering, but you’d be wrong. Once that ship starts sailing, it’s time to put it up, stat!

Our community garden is a disaster right now. Things are growing well, but we need to weed it so very badly. Yet, our weekends have been filled with other, non-garden related work. We’re looking at the summer project clock and watching it wind down needlessly fast, so we’re pushing 140% every single day to at least try to also achieve many of this year’s “life goals.”

Tuesday, we get home and our container gardens have gone nearly bone dry. That’s despite watering them this weekend. Many of our plants are drinking a gallon of water every 2-3 days! The intermittent rainfall isn’t even helping us a bit, our plants are just wicked thirsty. So, after some other chores and small projects, we slam a full watering in. Phew. Did I eat dinner? Don’t even remember.

Wednesday, we get home and are bluntly reminded the house is an absolute disaster. Between a couple food preservation sessions and making meals, our little Mt. Saint Dishes was getting a bit, uh, unacceptable. Oh, then we note that our central irrigation for our container gardens is also getting quite low, too. So, we refill our reservoirs with enough fertigated water to hopefully get us into the weekend.

We have like four crops that need to be harvested and preserved, like yesterday. Plus several major weeding’s we need to do. So, basically over the next few days here, we have to figure out how to put a week’s worth of work into a couple nights and a weekend. We’re not even going to give thought to the countless things we’re just NOT able to do.

Don’t take this as complaining. We like working hard and getting things done, it’s built into the fabric of who we are. It’s more to help you understand that we’re sometimes completely frazzled and barely keeping up, too.

We have been bemoaning the fact lately that the 40 hour work-week was built based on the idea that there’s someone at home, taking care of meals, keeping the house in order and generally making sure that home life is OK. We’re looking at each other and guess what? That person isn’t here! Certainly our cats aren’t pulling the extra weight and filling that role, LOL!

But, hey, at least our gardens make the “home side” very nice to be around, almost enough to help quell the rage. Anyway, that’s sounding dangerously close to a political statement, which we do NOT do around here, so I’m going to get off of here now. Point is this. We’re wrecked, figuring it out as we go and struggling to keep up. Just like you might be.