farm follows function

What could be more obvious than the truism that gardening is grounding? And how many ways can I belabor the fact? You stick a shovel in the ground, you sow seeds in the ground, you plant seedlings in the ground, you pull weeds from the ground, you slice ripe tomatoes that grew (magically) out of the ground, and you go back to the office the next day with some of the ground still under your fingernails.

So this weekend, Labor Day Weekend, I ritually observed the unofficial end of summer by doing some seasonal transitional chores that couldn't be much more mundane and put me into the rhythm of the earth, as if I could ever leave it.

Like thinning the little patch of lambs ear to make a border the whole length of the walk. Then dividing some of the daylilies to fill in gaps in the same bed. Next year it will look fuller.

Like moving three big, mound-shaped perennial geraniums from a back bed next to the veggies to a central location close to the patio, then transplanting three spindly little columbine from the same bed, where they weren't doing well, to a sunny spot near the salvia, where they might do better. Then thinning the strawberry patch to fill up the space left by the geraniums and columbine. Next year, with any luck, there could be twice as many strawberries. Then watering everything in. Buckets, hoses, whatever.

Like dividing the big, thick hostas with a slice of the spade and transplanting the dividends to the edge of the wedge-shaped bed to expand it further into the back corner where Gus the cat rests in peace. Then digging up clumps of mint (or lemonbalm, or whatever it is) that's been steadily encroaching on the hostas and anything else that's in its way, moving it to the weedy wasteland of the front corner, where the oldest, biggest Norway maple shields the sun and rain from everything under it, so nothing much grows there; we'll see if the mint/lemonbalm survives there long enough to cut back the tree and let some light in. That's a chore for later in the fall.

Like picking up apples and trying to find ways to use them up. A few fall every day, and half of them have bites out of them by the squirrels, or worm-holes, or they're too small to bother with, and those go in the compost. So by the time the weekend rolls around I've got a basketful of winesaps to do something with. What? So far, I've made apple cobbler, Gven has made apple crisp, and we've frozen a few.

It's labor-intensive, time-consuming work to peel, wash, core, and slice, even before the actual mixing, baking, and all that. But it's something to do on the weekend when I'm not copyediting, checking, tracking, proofing, revising, or answering e-mail. And I'm convinced that it's a lot more ergonomically correct to walk around all day carrying a shovel, moving from one plot to another, as long as I remember to switch hands. And you know what? I sleep better.