When I go out the to garden, I often come back with mild itching, especially if I've been weeding. Yesterday, I sat in the grass a while, hanging out. That was about 5:30pm. I had a little bit of itching on my hands and lower arms but that's typical. At 9pm, I suddenly had violent itching around my waistline and where my thighs meet my groin. I jolted up from my supine position and scratched as if I were trying to blind a cohort of demons. Nothing helped. Instead, welts raised up and my skin got all red. I shucked my pants and then my underwear, thinking perhaps something had come back in from the garden with me. But the itching continued and I scratched until I was pink and red at the waistline, groin, thighs, arms, midriff and armpits. Oh my god, SO ITCHY!
I scrubbed myself all over with today's bath but I'm still itchy all over. And red. There's the slight chance this is a reaction to the long walk I took yesterday and the sweat it brought on. I didn't bathe after the walk, nor did I change clothing. Maybe it was heat rash?
Anyway, since so much of the itching corresponded to where my clothing was cinched to me, I am now dressed in a pareu with a poncho over it. It's going to be a strange look when I go to Crushlab tonight.
If this turns out to be from the garden (esp. if it's ant bites), it's going to be a bummer. The ants are going crazy out there. As usual, there are Argentine ants EVERYWHERE.
Bareroot season is coming up and I'm starting to peruse online catalogs. And just the same way it works when I go into a comic book or record store, the more I see, the more I want. Just "going in" is dangerous. It's hard to limit myself to what is most time-sensitive instead of getting luxury plants like a Miracle Fruit bush.
Google Pedometer tells me I walked 4.5209 miles today (It said that worked off 837 calories. Two slices of cake would put it all back on, I think. Not that I had any cake, but I wasn't eating super-healthy, either.) That is a LOT for someone as out-of-shape as I am. So when I got home I was too tired to garden (and, actually, it was too hot). Now it's cooler but I don't want to water in the front yard because the neighbors are doing their usual yelling (instead of normal conversational tone), their relatives parking their cars in front of my driveway because they're too lazy to walk 10 feet further than they have to, and the kids going nuts outside 'til much later than my parents ever allowed me to stay up at that age.... When that happens, I just stay inside because otherwise my blood pressure starts climbing.
I was in the back yard for a short while to see whether the wanna-be general contractor my mom hired had finally (3.5 months after the fact) removed the soil his subcontractors poisoned by throwing their paint thinner all over it. He finally had, although I wish he'd done a longer strip to be sure. The feral cat and kitten are still hanging out in my backyard. They seem to have adopted a shade-dappled space underneath the park bench. I wanted to get them more used to me so I approached as close as I thought they'd take and sat there for a while. I really don't do enough sitting and enjoying of my garden. That's supposed to be part of what a garden is for, right??
At Cross-Pollination, a guy mentioned that one of his deciduous fruit trees had just bloomed again. Idell explained a little of why that might be but I have trouble remembering why. Anyway, today I noticed that one of my plum trees has done the same thing! Not profuse blossoming, but at least a half dozen. I noticed the Pakistan mulberry leafing out a couple weeks ago and I just thought that was its normal habit but now that it's leafing and blossoming (they don't look much like flowers...they actually look a lot like green mulberries), I'm beginning to think it's doing the same. I don't know why the plants are freaking out into a second spring. I mean, a second flush of warmth is pretty normal Bay Area weather. Our hottest month is usually October. So why is it different this year?
The Dancy tangerine is bursting with blossoms and the honeybees are all over it. But that's normal for that citrus variety.
Oh! I forgot to mention that I hit the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse to look for something I could use for plant tags. I didn't find anything appropriate. But then I saw Frazee Paint and realized paint stirrers would be perfect. I was prepared to buy some but they gave me a bunch for free. Whoopee!
I meant to write a detailed blog post but I blew my hands out so badly in the garden this morning that I have been icing them all day long. I took a small section of the garden near the chinotto orange and raked the mulch off so I could renew the cardboard part of the sheet mulching. I fertilized the orange, put the cardboard down, cutting to size where necessarily. I trimmed part of the pineapple salvia I don't like. Then I put the mini bark back on again. That should have been enough but I started thinking of things I should do while I had the tools out. So I pruned anything below the graft on the citrus. I stirred up the Tanglefoot that had gotten old until I could actually re-apply it. Unfortunately, the ants found a way onto some of the trees and they now have scale. Dammit.
I watered the EarthBoxes, bits of the lawn, the potted strawberries, and the mulberry tree. I pulled up a lot of the love-in-a-mist which had gone to seed. I decided I just wasn't going to get the time to harvest all the seed. I lopped as much of the volunteer pecan on one side as I could and pulled up the chard that had gone to seed so that now it's sitting on top of the raised bed instead of falling over and into the white coneflower. I lopped some of the blackberry coming over from the next-door-neighbor. And that was plenty. Then back in the house where I meant to sleep. However, the house was already too hot. So I just sat and watched DVDs and iced my wrists and elbows all damned day.
The event I conceived of, pitched to the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, and have been co-organizing with them for a year has finally come our way. If you're a gardener in the SF Bay Area or have *thought* about starting to garden, please attend Cross-Pollination: Gardeners Unite! This event is meant to be to gardeners what a user group fair is to computer users. I hope it will be a big success and turn into an annual event. I want to bring in even more participants next year. Please come!
I resisted the urge to take a siesta because I have so much I need/want to do in the garden. I got tired only a couple hours after I got up because the actions involved in bailing the bathtub of greywater and using it in the garden were too much for my hands. When my hands are bad, I just want to sleep.
So after my bath, I resisted sleep and instead went out to the garden to harvest poppy seedpods. I used a Felco ergonomic pruner. Unfortunately, I don't own a left-handed one so I had to use my right hand - which is the weak one right now. Just 15 or 20 minutes of carefully snipping off seedpod heads and putting them in a Ziploc bag was too much. And I had an icepack on as I was doing it!
Though there are tons more different seeds I need to harvest (Italian parsley, Erigeron glauca, marigold, cornflower, hollyhock, etc.), I have to call it quits. I did too much too early after surgery and this time I'm not recovering as well. It's scary.
