This Week (a Play, Garden Updates, and a Month's Worth of Yard Work)

Our lovely cast! We are all Providence Fine Arts Center students or alumni.

It’s been a crazy week! Putting on even a small play is quite an endeavor, and last weekend was packed with rehearsals, prop-making, logistics, and eating way too much Little Caesar’s pizza. But we did it! Both performances were packed out with a very receptive audience, and it was a joy to perform for them. Plus, we raised quite a bit of money for Providence Fine Arts Center! 

Being in a play gives you an incredible high, and with any high, there is a crash. On Monday I moped around the house pretty much all day, doping my brain on Facebook and allowing myself not to think for a day. But on Tuesday I had recovered from the physical crash (although the post-play blues never go away so easily), and decided to get outside and do about a month’s worth of yard work, since the humidity had finally lowered to a manageable level.

I was very pleased with what I got done yesterday— I weeded the square foot gardens (which were almost completely overrun with a nasty grass that sends out deep roots and runners), transplanted some berries that a friend gave me (thank you, Rachel!), mowed the lawn, and set to work on the two front beds. These beds were overrun with an impressive ecosystem of weeds, which I hacked down with a hoe and my bare hands. I piled all the weeds in the middle of the bed and put cardboard over the top (tip: if you go to Walmart at night when they’re stocking, they’ll let you have cardboard boxes for free), then covered it with a layer of mulch (the mulch was also free— a neighbor up the street had had a tree cut down, and the wood chips were up for grabs). As a finishing touch, I weeded and mulched the asparagus bed, which had been overrun with crab grass. My neighbor across the street, a kind older gentleman who keeps an immaculate lawn, was ecstatic to see me cleaning up my jungle of a yard. It was nice to prove to the neighbors that I can keep a tidy yard if I just set my mind (and muscles) to it.

I forgot to take a proper "before" photo, but this is what both beds looked like when I began...

Adding layers of cardboard...

And mulch...

Finished!

After yesterday’s work, I had a sun headache basically all day, but it was worth it. It had been a long time since I had been so drenched in sweat, the kind of sweat that soaks through every layer of clothing and runs in rivulets around the corners of your eyes. It makes a cold shower a euphoric experience.

As for my garden: all but the banana peppers are suffering, the lettuce is bolting, rabbits ate my parsley, the apple trees have been ravaged by Japanese beetles, the watermelons and tomatoes still haven’t ripened, but by golly, I still have an explosion of kale! I made a nice garden salad on Monday— kale, cucumbers, and banana peppers in a sesame dressing— and I remembered how great it is to make a dish where all the veggies came straight from the earth. Despite several plants with issues, I still have an abundant harvest, and I’m thankful for that.

May you have a beautiful week!

~Lisa