For the nervous wreck part, please read the post I just put up on son Colin’s caring bridge site — cuz I sure don’t want to go over it again!
Luckily, I realized some weeks ago, that in order for me to work with Colin’s long term ordeal in a fruitful manner, I would need to find a way to balance it. In other words, we are now dealing with what began as a life-threatening crisis (dissected aorta, both ascending and descending, which, after two surgeries, has left him paraplegic and riddled with nerve pain), and which, though offering an upward trajectory all along, has offered numerous (seeming?) emergencies along the way, many because of failure of communication among staff in the rehab facility, or among family and friends who have been caring for him all this time.
It came to me from out of the blue, in the midst of my own mental and emotional delamination (dissection), that the way for me personally to balance myself during the ongoing crisis was to do something creative with this place: this Green Acres Permaculture Village (see the website; though I have not updated the blog there since August 16). And I instantly knew what I wanted to do, something that has been percolating for awhile, but I was determined to actually dedicate myself to it.
This is to clear and redesign the back yard that now features the yurt, to the point where what one experiences out there when participating in weekly Community Dinners (again, haven’t had them since August 16), will be, starting in spring, 2024, the beauty and aroma of flowers and herbs, everywhere.
At this point, the neglected edges of the back yard, 4-5 feet thick in places, have been proliferating wildly all year. All sorts of plants, some wanted, some not, many “invasive” to the point where we would have to pull them eventually.
I looked back just now through photos I’ve taken this year, but none of them show the mess. Here’s where the situation was manageable, a photo of the yurt that I took in May, shortly after we put it up, from my bedroom window. You can’t see much, but the sense of growing along the edges is palpable.
Here’s another one, taken not too much later, that shows patio clean but what’s going on behind it? Yurt invisible behind the greenery on left.
Okay, so little by little, at 4 PM most days, I’ve been working for one hour to clear out all the overgrowth, and then prepare for next year by adding cardboard, compost, and mulch. Sometimes Marita joins me. Yesterday, Joseph and Ning Yao joined too. It was a good time; so good to work together again! BTW: We have kept the main, vegetable garden going, but not with regular Tuesday and Saturday work parties. Those too, have been interrupted by the Colin Catastrophe. We will need to put the main garden to bed soon, but first, this! Photos from yesterday.
The side gate was one area that had to be cleared. A month ago, it was impossible to even get to! So I worked on that, clearing it and putting cardboard down, with the beginnings of compost. Yesterday, Joseph spread chips to make a path.
More on the way.
Joseph and Marita decided that we needed to completely eliminate one little structure that holds boards, move them next to the garage, make it so this entire approximately square space bounded by fence, yurt, shed, and path to yurt, be prepared for what we envision next year, tall grasses behind, aromatic herbs and flowers in front. The entire garden space to have some kind of a design, which Joseph and Ning Yao will think up.
Here’s our process of preparing one, already cleared and leveled, bed that’s next to the one remaining veggie bed and bounded on the right by the chipped path to the yurt:
Cardboard and thick newspaper sections down, compost started to be hauled in. (BTW: we have compost beds all over this place formed underneath the many gigantic piles of sticks and twigs that we finally hauled away two weekends ago.)
Here Marita works on mulching the square space while speaking on phone with Colin.
More:
Finale! Mostly composted, ready to be mulched. With leaves. Which I raked up in front yard. About five days ago. Today, hopefully, we continue until the entire yard is where we want it before winter sets in.
BTW: I do my yoga/chikung/taichi in yurt every day around 5 pm. This helps me balance and center and ground immensely, both the circular yurt and the practices themselves.
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