A much needed tending to the garden 🌿

You know what ChatGPT can't do? Take care of your garden.

But it can make a joke out of it.

Oooookaaaay... So it can't be funny either, at least not on purpose.

Let's prompt it up.

That's a bit better 🙂 worth a faint smile, lol.

Anyway, as I said in an earlier post, I've been pretty hooked to this thing and neglecting some responsibilities which I'm not proud of, but it can't be denied how fun it is to chat with this robot. It's better than any videogame I've ever played. I even asked it to talk to me as if it were Siddhartha Gautama and it turned out to be a very interesting chat.

I made a post using it on my account Hive account@theapothecary where I was able to dive deeper into plant chemistry, yet when double checking the info I found there were many mistakes and inaccurate responses so I had to spend a lot of time fixing those. My conclusion is that if you're to use it for content creation, it's better to use it to outline the content and not trust it with the actual content as it's many times just made up. It has apologized more than once to me acknowledging that what was previously stated wasn't true.

So, moving on to the garden... The grass has been growing wild and things are just overall messy, there's much to do.

Though this is one of the wild gardens, the grass still needs to be handled because otherwise the other plants get eaten by the bugs that easily climb through the grass. Also, I use the method "chop and drop" which means I leave the cut grass right there to serve as future nutrients and also keep moisture in place.

Most of the times I spread the grass around the plants like you can see in the strawberry and potatoes below. However, plants that have their leaves too close to the ground might not benefit from this kind of mulching as it will also provide a good place for insects to gather.

Last year I let many radishes go te seed, but this year I have about 4 rows of radishes going to seed. I'm interested in making seeds part of my economy so I can rely less on money. Seeds are great because they can easily be transported and I intend to travel eventually so they should be a welcome addition to the different ways I can finance myself. The bad part is that the lack of sunlight in the forest and the heavy winds make them grow in all directions, covering other plants and closing the pathways.

This means I have to add some structure to these as well (I still haven't finished with the peas and beans, give me a break!). Gardening in the forest has this problem, but in the other side, you have infinite material for fences and structures, as well as lots for soil food.

I really enjoy working in the garden but I still can't feel satisfied with the work I get done. I feel that I don't make the amount of progress I would like. I have to remind myself that I don't live a conventional life anymore, that I get my water with a bucket from the stream, that I get all my firewood with a saw and a hatchet, that I have to cook for myself, keep my house relatively clean, that I'm my own therapist so I need meditation and time for self-care. All of this takes a lot of time, and Hive of course takes it's chunk as well (not to mention our robot friend, but that's only been on recent days).

So it's a constant task of taking off the pressure and appreciating the little achievements. Sometimes there's not even a "progress" but just feeling well that time was dedicated to maintaining.

Despite not being able to keep up with the demand of branches to give the peas structure, they have been very generous and they've become one of my main sources of food. I just love them at this stage when they are fresh and juicy. Especially this year they have been saviors, because the lack of sunlight has allowed little in the way of fruit. There's been a very apocalyptic weather in many places, perhaps the end is near 😬

There's also some things that I just can't tidy up, like the seeding Brussels and pak-choi:

Not that I mind, it's a delight to see how much seed will be coming off these plants 💚

I might even get lentil seeds this year since my experimentation seems to have been successful. Since last year I've been putting lentil sprouts in the soil from commercial lentils. I know these are GMO and programmed not to give offspring but my theory was that mutation can take place if you keep insisting. Most plants last year had small pods like this:

This year, however, I got one like this:

So that looks mighty good to me.

Enough for today! Hope you enjoyed the tour, have a beautiful moment ♾️