Hands in the Soil

What a great day it's been! I spent the entire day (well most of it, anyway) in the veggie garden. Planted a bed full of Dragon's Lingerie beans -- a great bean for drying. Cleared another bed for Carrots and Beets. Cleared weeds and thinned Beets. Cleared pathways and re-surveyed several of the beds that have "wandered" from years of being dug over using the Mark One Eyeball Edge Estimation Technique.

The weather was not brilliant -- windy with a not-so-subtle hint menace of chill, but better than the forecast for the weekend. That means I'll likely have be trapped indoors over the weekend, with plenty of time for my course-preparation work then, and I decided that I'd rather take advantage of my current happy-clientlessness and the half-decent weather to get preparations underway for the new season.

I really must build a compost heap, if only as a way to provide some bottom-heat for getting Chillis germinated. I have seed-trays planted out, but temperatures are certainly not what Chillis would really like, yet, so any help I can give them sounds like a good idea.

Even though I'm pretty out of shape from 9 months of deskwork and my lower-back and arms ache a bit, its a good ache! A much healthier feeling. I feel much, much better for having had my hands in the soil all day than I've ever got from having my hands on a keyboard all day.

The image of self-sufficiency as a life of pure drudgery and unremitting toil is just plain wrong. I can't imagine anything more drudgeful, unremitting and draining than a day of office politics, meetings and drearily coding CRUD¹. The human mind, body and spirit are not made for that; we need variety. We need quiet time. We need non-thinking time. We need contact with the Earth; with the soil. Gardening gives us all these and more.

I recall reading that physical contact with the soil has been proven beneficial: Soil contains bacteria and fungi that stimulate endorhpin production and so literally makes us feel good! (Wish I could find the reference, but I can't. Anyone who does, please drop me a line.) I guess this assumes that your soil is healthy and free of toxic concoctions...

Whatever the reason... a Good Day!
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[1] For non-computer people, that's a technical acronym for "Create Read Update Delete" -- the most boring, mindless and tedious kind of programming there is. And a whole bunch of what's wanted out of corporate software.