the banality of If This Goes On
Mon 2014-08-04 23:45:52 (in context)
Each week's farm work has a lesson to impart. Today's lesson was about maintenance, the importance of, for use in taking control of one's future or at least exerting control over the shape thereof. In other words, weeding.
We spent all morning in the herb garden. The goal was to harvest a bunch of variations of thyme and also the winter savory, but first a lot of weeding was needed. And it's amazing how the weeds just take over. You think you're keeping up with them, but suddenly they bolt, and now you've got a four-foot ragweed stalk shooting up out of the center of your mother-of-thyme like it thinks it belongs there.
It has always struck me as particularly unfair that the crop you want always seems to grow slower than the weeds you don't want. Thyme is a ground cover, right? In addition to being an herb? And lemon balm is a species of mint, which is known for getting out of control. And yet, if you leave the crop bed to its own devices, you will eventually find your mint, thyme and savory drowning in bindweed and thistle and lamb's-quarter and ragweed and ouch did I mention the thistle? Yes, well, I only mention it because a pile of it is what I sat in just now.
So before we got to harvesting, we had to pull up or slice out a bunch of weeds.
Then there was harvesting itself, which is also a lesson in how important it is to deliberately maintain. Best practice with leafy herbs is to keep them from flowering just as long as you can, forcing the plant to put all its energy and growth and aromatic oils into its leaves. Once the plant starts blossoming, seed-time can't be far behind, and before you know it the leaves have diminished markedly in flavor. Also, if you don't cut them back often, herbs like thyme and savory start changing from soft green sprigs to stiff woody stems that don't make for a high-quality harvest. So there's that.
We made up for a lot of lost time today and harvested a heck of a lot of thyme. And I brought home a few flowering sprigs of savory for that corn chowder I intend to cook any day now.
My daily routine is a lot like that, too--without deliberate maintenance, the stuff I want (good habits) tends to drown under the stuff I don't want (bad habits). Working with HabitRPG has been a big help, but even when I click my way to a perfect day there are loopholes to slither out of. Like, yes, I did my Morning Pages even on a Monday, but did I do it right when I woke up, or did I snooze away my before-farm time and leave it hanging over my afternoon? Yes, I checked voice mail on the land line today, good for me, but did I do it as part of my arrival home, or did I only remember to do when I saw that the corresponding HabitRPG "Daily" task was still not checked off? When I put in my five hours writing on a work day, did it go towards meaningful progress on my career goals or was it just busywork? Did I get right to my daily writing tasks, or did I putter around, reading forums and blogs, playing jigsaw sudoku and Puzzle Pirates, until finally, late in the afternoon, I finally and grudgingly gave in to basic arithmetic, recognizing that if I didn't start now it would be chronologically impossible to clock five hours for the day?
Well. As for today, damn straight I did my Pages before I went to the farm. And when I got the call that I wouldn't be needed until 45 minutes later than usual, I did my CTC29 too.
That's what I call daily weed-pulling!
Still, I'm sure that by tomorrow they'll be making a vigorous comeback. Hopefully I'll be up to the task of knocking them back again.