Adventures in gardening

I wonder what would happen if you could purify sweat. Could you bottle it all up and reuse it? I doubt it, but somehow I wish it was possible considering the amount of it that came off of me today.

Ken and I worked in the yard all day. I checked weather.com at one point, considering I was on my 3rd set of dry clothes, and it said the heat index was 122. Wunderground.com said it was 105. I'll just average the two together and call it even.

We got a lot done. Ken worked on the arbor that we started, oh... over a year ago. We had to meticulously unwrap the wisteria from around the support poles. Some of the new vine got broken in the process, but I think it'll be ok. He put lattice along the sides, evened the poles out, re-wrapped the wisteria around them, and now all that's left is the top.

Meanwhile, I was playing in the dirt. This spring, I had the grand idea to remove all these old lillies and crocosmia that had taken over the west side of the house. They were probably planted by someone that meant well, many moons ago. Then the house got sold to some SCAD boy's parent to provide his son & his friends with a place to live. Something tells me college boys aren't into gardening. The flowers were left to grow wild, and oh did they. When I removed them, there wasn't much soil there. It was one huge mass of bulbs, roots, bulbs, roots, and more bulbs. I was moderately successful. Except that I didn't really have a plan of what I was going to do with that side of the house after that.

Later on I realized that I really liked those flowers after all. Of course. When I moved the flowers, I didn't believe that I could throw a perfectly good (nonpoisonous) plant away, so I threw them all in pots together. Miraculously they survived in the pots, with no soil, only sun and water. Today, I put them all back. However, this time I did what that good old house inspector told us to do when we bought the place. I pulled the plants away from the house with a good layer of rocks & weed blocker to deter them. They seem happy to be home so far. I did have to throw away some of the bad ones, so I guess I successfully thinned out a flower bed... in a very roundabout way.

I also planted some new hosta and some siam tulips in my other beds. I will have to take pictures, because I just adore them both.

So... success! In one way or another.

Feng Shui

I live in a perpetual state of organized chaos. Most of the time when I try to "organize" I end up loosing something. This means that I tried to find a place to put said thing, and wherever I put it made perfectly logical sense at the time. However, it does not make sense whenever I go looking for it again, therefore I can't find it. When you live this way, stuff tends to pile up. Especially if you are also a professional procrastinator.

Ken and I had a rough weekend. There has been a lot of stress in the house. and I really couldn't put my finger on why. Then Sunday night, as I tried to get to sleep, it dawned on me: if I controlled the chaos in the house I could control the chaos in our minds. If your place of comfort and sanctuary is always a mess, then it has to mess something up psychologically. Unless you're perfectly fine with it that way. For us (especially my OCD husband), it wasn't working. I was trying to ignore the mess. I didn't think it bothered me, but deep down, it did. For example, by the front door there were clothes that needed to go to the cleaners, a socket kit, containers of unused motor oil, stuff to go to Goodwill, a radiator (in a box), and lots of dust bunnies. It was visual chaos as soon as we walked in the door.

So yesterday I gave up my whole day to clean and put stuff away. Put stuff where it goes! Where I will remember where it is! Because it's where it always goes (except for the radiator), I was just too lazy to put it away in the first place! And I did. I took stuff to the cleaners, and I organized. I matted, framed, and hung a poster on the wall that had been sitting on an easel in an awkward location for a year. I also hung a mirror on the wall that had been in an odd spot. I cleaned out my closet and gave a lot of my old office clothes away (good riddance!).

Now when I walk in the house, it's instant calm. The entire visual aesthetic of the house is so much nicer. All I had to do was put stuff away. In its right place. And it worked. It's amazing what de-cluttering can do. Home feels so much better.