I'm sorry I left you on hold so long. You know girls when they get on the phone. Actually, not this girl....I hate the phone. I didn't even cue the elevator music for you. Ironically, I like elevator music. Elevators are not the most pleasant of places for me, especially if you are stuck in one with a person who is a jerk. Trust me, it happen to me at a convention in North Carolina. While in Pittsburgh I had to fight with Mary Kay ladies for 45 minutes just to get in one......I've never seen so many bubbly, understated, and practically dressed women in my life. Ahem…. But for some reason I find that lame incredibly irritating music soothing. That's a subject I'll have to save for later.
The Bitch...getting a ride home with someone else
I really can't believe it has been since December that I posted. You see, I’ve hardly been able to find the time to do laundry let alone the multitude of other things I have going on right now. To be honest, I haven't really felt like writing either. Traveling, speaking, raising kids, did I mention laundry, and trying to find time to spend with my husband aka my mechanic, hasn't made it easy for me to write. I've been on the road so much he has spent more of his time fixing and maintaining my car then he has with me. Maybe that's one reason he dubbed her The Bitch. That and she is really high maintenance and can be hard to work on, she's a foreign import. Here's something I've been thinking about.... my husband, aka my mechanic, said one evening....maybe you shouldn't refer to me as your mechanic, it could have another meaning. I really don't know what he means by that. Maybe someone will politely fill me in.
Let's go back to that “feeling like it” thing for a minute. My 'job' has left me a bit disillusioned as well. I'm sure over the course of time I will go into more detail without hurting the innocent too much. For now, I'm going to let that subject alone.
Enough for the excuses. I always tell my kids an excuse is just a reason wrapped in a lie. Stuff like that sounds good until they use it on you.
I left off with my last post talking about soil health. Boy is that a broad term. After being on the road and talking about it so much I have likened it to how we should view our own health. We should find balance, be realistic with expectations, and we are a reflection of what we eat. If you where to meet me, I'm a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and Almond M&M's. Just the blue and the green M&M's, they're my favorite colors, hence they have no calories. Soil health is about balancing practices and nutrients. If you start with poor soils you need to have realistic expectations about how well your plants will grow. Plants will only grow as good as they eat. Yep folks, plants eat too. All that stuff in the soil is what holds, converts, or becomes nutrients for plants.
Look....a real live worm!
In my garden, not the neighbors
I got to thinking, how can I talk about soil health on a scale most will understand? Then I realized it's that time of year when people are getting their gardens started. If you are like me, you didn't do what you were supposed to at the end of last year. I should have put in a cover crop. Yeah, that didn’t happen. That brings me to….to till or not to till, especially when starting a garden? When I started my first garden my dad came over to help. He’s an old school conventional kind of guy. He told me all I needed was Round Up and a shovel. We sprayed everything in our path, waiting until it dried, and off we went. Tilling the whole thing with a shovel. Backbreaking and garden breaking. Yep, that was my garden. Nuked and turned, just how it should be. Now I take a different approach, opting not to spray everything with cancer causing chemicals and turning it over so the sun can bake what few worms I had left from spraying that stuff. My practices were in essence killing everything in the soil I needed to produce healthy plants. It disrupted the natural habitat where the soil organisms function and live. Do you know worms actually help till the soil? Go ahead, ditch the shovel. Now, I invest time in the fall to prep my beds by layering compost or manure, peat moss or coconut coir-depending on what I’m planting, and grass clippings or chipped up clippings from our hedge. I let that sit as long as I can, preferably over winter. If I don’t think ahead, which is usually the case, I add some potting mix. I almost forgot…I love leaves! Our son, who is second in command of the grounds crew at our estate, likes to run over leaves with the mower. Okay, I let him do it once and it was a huge mess. Somebody forgot to put the bag on the mower. Now I just throw them into the mix and let nature take its course. You see, everything will compost eventually.