Last week's staycation at the farm was just what I needed after a hectic quarter (the week before I had no less than 3 students crying in my office!). Rather than commute back and forth from my condo to there, I decided to stay overnight for a few days in order to be able to work on the garden in a more leisurely manner. I also wanted to take a break from the usual routines and to be able to wake up and sleep surrounded by nature. And I got just what I asked for.
One of the first things I usually do when I get to the farm is to make the rounds and to see what is blooming, pickable, or in dire need of weeding. This time around, I saw that all the garlic had grown scapes that were getting ready to bloom so off they came so that the garlic would expend its energy into growing its bulb rather than flowering. Garlic scapes have a mild garlicky flavor (surprise!) and are great sauteed or stir fried with some other veg.
I also had a few projects in mind besides the usual non-stop weeding. Linda, the queen of DIY, had given me a few milk jugs when I had told her my theory that the reason why my tomatoes had been doing so dismally year after year was the lack of consistent watering. She suggested I use the jugs to create self-watering reservoirs for the tomatoes, which I thought was a great idea. "How hard can it be?" is my inherited motto but sometimes it doesn't quite prove true. These containers were a bit trickier than anticipated as I was apparently overzealous with my poking on the first two jugs. When I went to check on them the day after I filled the jugs, they were already completely empty. So round two had me poking only two tiny holes on the side facing the tomato. This time around, the jugs seemed about a third full when I checked the next day but it was a little hard to judge the depth of the water, so I'm going to leave them be and see how the tomatoes fare this summer.
My other project of which I'm rather proud is this bean trellis that I constructed out of twine and the bamboo poles from my dad's back yard. When I initially told him my plan, my dad wanted to give me 5' poles, saying that they'd be hard to fit in the car otherwise, but I was pretty sure that bean trellises were usually around 8 feet tall as I had seen them towering over other people's backyard fences. We compromised at 6' and he trimmed up the poles he had harvested from his bamboo trees. Once they were in the ground, they were a little under 6' with the horizontal pole just high enough to not be eye-poking height (at least for me). I wound the twine around the top and bottom, then immediately put my scarlet runner beans, which I had started at home and were ready to climb, in the ground. I had put some squash in the space between the poles but on second thought, after seeing some photos of how full the vines get, I moved them to more open space.
Dad came to visit me out at the farm and did a whole lot of weedwacking, which spiffed the place up quite a bit. We picked the first of the favas and shelling peas, though he kept protesting that the favas were still too small but I was glad we could enjoy the young tender beans which didn't have to be shucked twice because the inner membrane was still tender enough to eat. For my next harvest, I want to try grilled fava beans, which I'd also heard praises about from Ms. Foodie herself, Vicky, when she went to Kyoto in the spring.
Finally, I was able to make several bouquets of flowers for friends and family from flowers that I had grown from seed (which is its own small thrill) and which have been blooming so wildly these last few weeks. The Sweet William along with cuttings of sage flowers just smelled fantastic and I also learned the name of the bell-shaped mystery flowers, campanula or bellflower, as well as these delicate blue flowers with the fern-like leaves: love-in-the-mist. Isn't that just an absolutely fantastic name?
I could've stayed there longer but duty called and it also started raining and raining, so with reluctance, I packed up and returned to reality. But I'll be out there again. That's the lovely thing about staycations--you don't have to travel anywhere to go on one. You're already there; you just need to make that mental switch to begin one.
I'll finish with two quotes from Simone Weil about what it means to pay attention. It seems that often the victim of busyness is our attention and most of the time, we need to get away from it all to open up the space to pay attention again. However, once we return to "reality," that attention diminishes or disappears again. Staycations can be little portals to paying attention again, to each other, to the beauty around us, and to the things that matter, and I can't wait until I can go on another one.
"[Attention is] a suspension of one's own self as a center of the world and making oneself available to the reality of another being."--Simone Weil
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."--Simone Weil
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