I spent yesterday afternoon outside. It was cool, though not cold enough for me to throw a fleece on over my long-sleeved shirt, which meant it was an overall pleasant day in my corner of Texas.
When I finally made it outside after doing inside chores and a run to the grocery store, my husband Chris was still working on running leaves through our mulcher into the compost. We brought home two truckloads full of bagged leaves from family over the holidays and we’ve come to rely on them every year to fill up our compost bins. I don’t want to think of the carbon footprint of moving leaves from 4 hours away to our house but at least they aren’t ending up in a landfill. I’m still unsure why my dad, or my in-law’s landscape crew, can’t run their mower over the leaves a few times in the fall to mulch it in place over their own lawn but I’ve given up trying to present an argument to either one of them.
So, Chris was mulching leaves, which was a bit inconvenient because it was loud and unfortunately the potting bench is right next to the compost bins, but I had a pile of baggies full of seeds I’d been cold stratifying in the fridge for a few months and I needed to sow them before spring.
I hadn’t done anything on the potting bench in months, in reality more than a year. Sure, I had tinkered around on it a few times, cleaning up some pots or dropping stuff off to leave there for some other time to clean up, but in 2022 I had moved a lot of my seed starting materials out to the fenced edible garden where it gets considerably more sun. The potting bench used to be perpetually covered in something we were growing out or starting and then it became much less used. Sure, we still have a couple of things growing, namely several sapling Nyssa aquatica plants that sit in tubs of water waiting to be planted on our pond, but the main growing operations had moved.
Being out there at the potting bench was cathartic, though. It brought back memories from all of the time I spent out there in years past, pulling weeds out of pots, transplanting seedlings, or starting new seeds. It abuts a chain-link fence and an amalgamation of yaupon, Smilax, and nandina from the neighbor’s yard, which I have to trim from the fence line from time to time. Two years ago we got new neighbors and they are much more active in their yard than the previous owners, who we would rarely see. I can see into their yard more and they have free-ranging chickens during the day and grand kids over often, which makes that portion of my own yard less inviting to hang out at with the bustle of activity next door. There’s still a buffer between the activity but you know, it’s less quiet and private than it used to be.
I sowed seeds while Chris mulched. Our son came in and out of the house, running around the yard, taking breaks to play his pad, coming back out to look for rocks on the path. It felt so good.
Spending the last month off of Instagram (with a few checks from my desktop) has been good for my brain. I’ve decided I’m not leaving forever but I’m going to alter how I use it, which will be desktop only and to only post to my grid and to mute all stories from everyone, and to check on stories from people as I think about them only. I got the muting stories bit from another podcaster I listen to and it was such a revelation. It would be how Instagram used to be, which was less mind-cluttering. And I thought about my podcast while I was sowing those seeds. Not having that worry, the thinking about who to interview next, what topics I should cover, marketing the podcast, etc, etc. I could just…garden. I enjoy the photography and writing aspects but I’m done with thinking about it in terms of content.
Content. That’s what so much of our online life is these days, creating or consuming content. Is Substack, blogging, and newsletters about content? Yes and no. Some folks on Substack certainly use it as a method for content generation. But it is still vastly different than battling for eyes over an algorithm or trying to come up with new and useful information to constantly be sharing to keep eyes on your account. Some people can use social media without doing that, and on some types of social media I can manage to avoid it. I couldn’t do that with Instagram, at least in the latter years. Share, share, share….pivot, pivot, pivot. AHHHHH!
After the potting bench I grabbed my phone to call a friend and started pulling weeds. Oh boy, one of the beds was so over run that I’ll be dealing with that for a few weeks. But in doing all of that I felt like my old self. My self before social media.
2024 will be the year I pay attention outside, leave my phone inside so I can’t share, share, share, and instead take photos with my camera again. It will be the year of moving slowly and noticing once again.
It will be a year of gardening, in more ways than one.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature. She hosts Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and formerly The Garden Path Podcast.
Love this post! Being I've been on the East Coast a lot these last few months, I simply CANNOT believe how many people still set their leaves in bags out for the garbage men to pick up. I've convinced my sister to just move them to the patch of woods in her backyard to decompose, as she can't fathom just leaving them on her lawn. Anyway, it's mind-boggling. But I'm glad you are able to make good use of your parents' leaves.