in which our heroine, princess groundy pants, plans her first garden

To put this in context, allow me to share with you my only previous experience with gardening:

                             

Mom, I love you, but honestly: what did you think would happen? Sending an innocent ten-year old out to fight the dandelions, equipped only with a butter knife?

I think it was that same year that my brother fell in love with the peony bush at the end of the yard. It put out a great flood of white buds…

Do you have any idea how beautiful a bush full of these things is to a 12 year old boy armed with a baseball bat? That’s right: he thwacked off every... last... one.  But I digress.

Some people are able to plant a garden, or at least tulip or daffodil bulbs, wherever they go. for some reason, that hasn’t been me. But now, ensconced at Dave, I can finally launch an expedition in search of my inner gardener.

Thus, last weekend, I attended a workshop on how to plan a 9x12 garden. It was only marginally helpful – the rant will start in a couple of paragraphs – and today, I bought My First Seeds!

Let’s see, what do we have: stuff for butterflies, no idea what it is yet. Some ARUGULA, and basil, and mesclun mix. I wimped out when it came to tomatoes – too many choices. I’ll get there, I’ll get there, don’t worry. Oh, and cilantro.

So the aforementioned workshop was not as helpful as I would have liked. A whole lot of proselytizing about how peak oil is going to bring society to its knees, and our grandparents sure knew all about gardening and putting food by, and blah blah blah…dude, you’re preaching to the choir, as I emailed the event’s coordinator afterwards.

What would REALLY have been useful is to know which plants I should start ahead of time in the windowsill, and which plants I can start directly in the lawn. And please don’t show me a bunch of different kinds of hoes without explaining what you use ‘em for – as noted earlier, I don’t know squat about gardening, and ostensibly that’s who – you’ve – designed – this – particular – workshop – for: ignoramuses like me.

Whew, I feel better having gotten that off my chest.

In other news, boy, I really tuckered myself out over the last week with all my running. Too much speedwork, and various other sins. So I took Sunday – the long run – off. And I took Monday off. And yesterday, I started from scratch with … heavy sigh… just a few minutes of alternating running and walking. Just 2.5 mph for the walking…when normally, it’s between 3.5 and 4 mph when I walk. And I took today off. The good news is that my legs don’t ache anymore. Tomorrow I plan to do some more running/walking.

The one good thing I can say about this is, I think I’m going to go with the Galloway, as opposed to the Higdon, training plan. Galloway is all about preventing injuries. Since my ultimate, ultimate goal is to be able to run well into my 60’s or even 70’s, injury prevention is key. It felt so great to work as hard as I have over the last couple of weeks – the exhaustion that followed kind of took me by surprise. (Welcome to your 40’s, Sarah…) Then again, why am I surprised at this, given how much I threw myself into my job over the past several years, and how hard I crashed when I finally burned out? Isn’t this why I’m on this sabbatical?

Hmmmmm…….