More musing today…
I am always in a dreamy state of mind this time of year. Probably because the time to hibernate is coming on quickly. I am sincerely playing with the idea of the first fire in the hearth of the season, some night this week.
Tomorrow, I will share something practical. I have some amazing raw honey extractions I have concocted. Today, I don’t feel very practical or focused because I am little sad about my garden and I just want to ramble.
Gardening, to say the least, was disappointing this year. What little warm weather vegetable harvest I have had is late, due to the plants stalling out during the worst of the heat and the dry this summer. Still, my fall crops that I planted in mid August are hanging in there and the hops vine seems to have survived the transplant.
The drought is decimating my garden, still. When Steve and I cleared the back yard, it was disheartening to see how straggly and beat down a lot of my friends look. I think my plans of applying as a UPS sanctuary are set back a couple of years. I lost my goldenseal and my stoneroot. My raspberry patch looks terrible. I am hesitant to plant anything new, right now.
The plants in the front of the house are doing a little better, living under the shade of our giant ash tree. Although I do think he may be using up more than his fair share of what little precipitation we are getting. Thankfully things that did make it this far, seem to have gone into super-propagation mode and I am having good seed harvests. I will be able to start new plants next spring, bring in compost and mulch and maybe try to fit more water into the budget.
I am alternately fiercely devoted to and incredibly frustrated by my little patch of wild land here among the neatly clipped grass yards.
I just can’t quite connect. Probably because I haven’t put my whole heart into it.
I often say I will bloom where I am planted, but a part of me is always wishing I were someplace else and I think my little patch of land might resent me for it, just a bit.
Or that ambivalence is blocking me from seeing what this place needs?
When we first moved here I thought we should name our place. I never could come up with a name that I thought fit. More ambivalence, maybe?
I was walking home from the bar with friends the other night, telling the story about my ash tree and I put my hand on the tree to show where the truck left its mark . I thought of the plants he protected from the worst of the sun this summer and a good name for our tiny urban homestead occurred to me.
Faoi na Fuinseoige
I didn’t occur to me in Gaelic, I am not nearly that cool. I had to look some of it up. I knew ash tree, I wasn’t sure of the rest. The literal translation of the phrase is “under the the ash”, but I found it translated as “under the protection of the ash” enough that I am comfortable giving it that meaning. It is pronounced: Fwee nuh FWIN-shoy-geh. If you are interested in hearing it, you can plug it in here.
I think it is pretty fitting, don’t you?
