I love Texas. Let's start off with that. It's damn near September, and I'm planting our second crop of potatoes. Our second because I'm lazy, we could have done three crops if I'd had the time planned out and managed right. Maybe one day I'll take something seriously enough to do it right. Something to meditate on, perhaps.
Today was absolutely bonkers busy. Melissa was out of town yesterday and got home this morning just in time to go to church, where I was on the schedule to run the camera. Yesterday, as I wrote, I went to the dairy for seventeen gallons of milk. Today was the day to go to a friend's house to pour and distribute most of it. While there, we tried my friend's first batch of artisan bacon. I think it's garlic, oregano, rosemary, and cumin, and it tastes like heaven. And we chopped trees and fellowshipped and all tried kratom and didn't take any pictures to document anything. It was awesome.
When I got home, the maeng da kratom kicked in and I entered GSD mode. My friend gave me a shovel, so I was plum out of excuses for not planting potatoes. With the euphoric energy of the kratom, digging the 25 holes a foot deep and a foot round went really fast. Like, under half an hour fast. I didn't time it, but it felt like maybe fifteen minutes. The light rains we've had the last few days (thanks, hurricane Laura) have softened the sandy loam soil, so I'm sure that helped with the digging too.
I dug the holes in the rows where I wanted to have amaranth this year. Due to my laziness, only five plants came up, so there's still plenty of space for taters.
I dug an extra hole because I don't know how to count. From our potato crop earlier this year, I saved two dozen small potatoes in egg cartons under the sink where they had the dark, warm conditions that I read they needed for chitting. So these potatoes, grown from food waste, will be grown for free as seed that we grew here. That's a cool feeling. I really like it. Hopefully we'll have a crop that'll get planted next spring too.
Each little tater was planted with a kiss and a little prayer of thankfulness, providence, and abundance. I keep wondering if, in conjunction with my lack of work and stewarding, my corn and other crops failed because of my lack of spiritual involvement. So I've been praying in and for the garden more. Prayers for wisdom and guidance mostly, and thankfulness for the abundance that I know is stored in the soil here.
I should be able to fall into a steady rhythm with watering these plants when I get home from work. I've left the hose there by the patch so that all I have to do is turn it on and stand there, maybe walking a bit between rows. Precisely my style of working 😉 and the whole thing is just a few meters from my route that I walk from the car to the front door. Zone one gardening. I could have brought it closer, but I'd already started that patch of amaranth, so why make a whole nother patch and have two patches to tend? Too much work lol
I'm a tad down on myself over what I call my gardening style this year. Bottom line, I've succumbed to the laziness of my affluent culture. That's not godly, that's not frugal, and that's not responsible. I've not been a good steward, and it's sending a lot of ripples in my life. So I'm doing things differently. I'll embrace efficiency still, but I'm working on rejecting laziness. Honing myself against it. I know I keep saying that. Every time I say it, it's a hammer strike in hot steel, shaping it into a better tool. And when the time comes, I'll temper the edge with another meditation session like the last. I'm looking forward to it, of course. Any deep work and improvement like that excites me. I'll make a post soon about my main recent benefit, but it'll be a tad odd.
Anyways, yeah. Potatoes and kratom. I think I like this stuff, I'll have to look into it more. I can totally see how it can make simple tasks easier and help folks be more productive. Clear headedness, energy, focus. Though the focus has made other things really annoying if they're not in that focus. Like, what I've been focused on has been planting potatoes and then writing a blog about it, and the wife is being crazy annoying asking me to take out the trash nine hundred times an hour. So I am wrapping up this post to go focus on that.
Gnite.
Love from Texas
Nate 💚