Brick of the litter

A good strategy, when one finds oneself incapable of focusing on writing, is to make oneself so unbelievably sore that the desk chair is the only comfortable option.

Mission: accomplished.

I spent the whole entire day outside yesterday, hauling lumber and wielding power tools. Power tools = my happy place. Then I jiggered and re-jiggered and re-jiggered those frames until everything measured true and square. Then I laid down weed block fabric, then I poured sand. Then I was Zen-like for a little while leveling the sand, and then I hauled brick and laid brick and smiled A LOT.

Life is such a good thing right now.

The lumber frames are temporary; once I finish laying the brick and sweeping more sand down into the cracks between, and let it all cure and settle for a month (and hopefully a few good drenching rainstorms) I'll remove them and unscrew them and reuse the lumber as part of my greenhouse frame. Ah, plans.

The beds themselves aren't getting planted until next year-- except the herb bed-- and I'm going to spend the summer laying cardboard and newspaper and dumping buckets of food scraps on the dirt, then mulch it all with autumn leaves and let it go all winter. This experimental plan is one of the things making me a little giddy lately-- just plainly curious to see if it works, if it results in a till-free garden full of rich, crumbly soil well-tunneled by earthworms. 

The beds will grow mostly leaf, stem, and root crops, the polite kind that mind their manners and don't go sprawling over creation like zucchini bushes and tomato vines. What I'm picturing when I smile like I'm crazed is a lush, picture-perfect shock of red-stem Swiss chard leaning luxuriantly out over those red-brick paths. Can you see it? It'll look like a painting, I tell you. A damn painting.

Lucky, lucky me.

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