Sculpin

If we were going to take wood to the dump anyway, we might as well take a full load, we figured. So today Josh and I took out the too-large frames for the raised beds at our place. I’m going to configure the beds in a whole new way, and then this time we’ll live with them for a year or two to make sure they’re really what we want before we build frames for them. So there was the digging and the prying and the hauling.

It’s been a very heavy load of work for me, this hardcore gardening, and I’m psyched that I’m able to do it. I’ve made a lot of gains these last several months; last week I was released from physical therapy on grounds of kicking ass. As I was leaving, I overheard Dan the PT saying, “Yeah, this was her last day. It’s great to see. I’m really happy for her. She’s been working really really really hard.” It’s kind of bittersweet: I’ll miss PT, because it was fun and I was very good at it. I’ve surprised everybody. Dan gave me a big hug and made me promise to keep in touch.

I’ve still got plenty to do, but I’m at a whole new level of physical competence now. For instance, I can walk up hills now. About ten days ago I powered my way up Virginia from the Pike Place Market to First. Not too many years ago I had a regular appointment about a third of a way down that block, and I’d have to pause a few times on my way up. Now, vroom. (Okay, maybe more like puttputtputt, but it was steady and, for me, powerful.) I hadn’t felt my lungs work like that in more than ten years; they seem hugely expansive now! It was fascinating to feel the ribcage expanding and contracting side-to-side. This whole medical-fitness thing has been mentally absorbing. The kinetic chain from the hips to the feet continues to interest me. I turn on a hip muscle so and abracadabra, my weight shifts back on my heels. Super.

In other news, today I noticed my first gray hair. I’m 35, so I’m well overdue. It’s a pretty nice gray, I have to say — shiny and light — but it also makes me recognize even more strongly that getting off my ass is exactly what I ought to be doing right now. I got squashed by chronic illness for the better part of a decade. For somebody who had severe CFS for a lot of that time (I’m talking Bell 10 to 30, possibly less), and moderate CFS for a great deal more, I did pretty damn well for myself. But I missed out on a whole lot of moving around, is what I’m saying. I feel that I’m entering a sweet spot between illness-related decrepitude and age-related decrepitude, and I want to make the most of it while I can.

After tidying the house with me yesterday morning, Josh went down to the P-Patch to work. I joined him about an hour later and worked with him there for three hours, grubbing out weeds and rotten wood trash. I think we’ve finally gotten most of the quackgrass out of there — I was down on my hands and knees for most of that with a cultivator in among the raspberries. My hands were protected, but my arms are thoroughly scratched up; I look like I could be a worker in a kitten factory. (And wouldn’t that have been an interesting “Picture Picture”.) We took out a garbage bag and a half of noxious weeds, and grabbed a bunch of raspberry volunteers to transplant to our place. On Monday, with any luck, we’ll rent a Flexcar and take all that trash to the dump. I hope to have the place set up for planting by Saturday after the Tilth plant sale.

Came home, stumbled in and out of the shower, settled down to watch Real Genius. (Thanks, T and Spiff!) Hours later I reached up to brush some hair out of my eyes, and I recoiled: ohmygod what’s wrong with my head?! Oh. I’d been so tired that I’d forgotten to wash the conditioner out of my hair. I failed showering.

When I said, “Don’t get me started on the rotting wood,” I thought that Josh might be writing about our P-Patch too, since he took some photos. And since he hasn’t, let me point out that he hauled out a big, heavy load of rotting wood on his bicycle. I don’t know how heavy it was; it was too heavy for me to pick up at the time. So a metric shit-ton of wood went on one Xtracycle wide-loader, and some peonies went on the other one. It was wildly unbalanced. I had to help push the bike up the path out of the garden; it was definitely not rideable. Which didn’t keep him from trying.

That was a long day. I was tuckered out.

On Tuesday afternoon, I watched a beehive being installed at the Picardo P-Patch. It’s amazing to watch somebody dump several thousand bees out of a box. The sound is tremendous. I got a lot closer than I was expecting to!

I’d heard of “re-queening” but didn’t know what exactly it involved, so it was interesting to watch Thane the bee guy put the queen in. It’s not the queen from the original hive, so it takes a few days for the bees to get used to her. She started in a little screened wooden box with a stopper, and he replaced the stopper with a mini-marshmallow. By the time the bees have chewed through the marshmallow, they will have accepted her.

After they’d settled down from the indignity of being shaken out of a box, you could see the newly-installed worker bees hanging out in front of the hive fanning the air vigorously. Thane said they were sending out pheromones that say, “This is home!”

It was during the bee dumping that I became exquisitely aware that my borrowed beekeeper’s mask was a little problematic. It had gotten severely squashed in storage, and I wasn’t quite able to unsquash it, so it kept touching my ears, which suddenly seemed like landing pads for angry bees. But while there were a few folks who got stung that day, I wasn’t one of them.

Later on I retreated a ways and took off that problematic mask. It’s weird to get bees stuck in your hair. They seem really, really loud. It takes a couple of seconds for them to untangle themselves. A few times they ran right into my sunglasses. POCK!

Thane’s doing some sort of project with a bunch of kids from U. Prep. “My goal is to get one new beekeeper a year,” he said; he sounds very committed to small-scale apiculture. So he looked intrigued by my interest in the bees, and I’m sure intrigued by his interest in teaching beekeeping. I’ve been interested in beekeeping for — sheesh, must be coming up on twelve years now, but there was always something keeping me from getting involved. My concerns these days have been (a) would I get freaked out by thousands of agitated bees? and (b) can I physically perform the required movements? But in fact I felt cautious but unfreaked, and the Picardo bee yard is a very handy place for me to further acclimate to the presence of tens of thousands of bees. As for (b), Thane has some possible technical solutions for my problems with lifting heavy things.

Thane mentioned some neat art one of his friends made. The guy’s a ceramic artist; he made a big bowl, glazed it, and put it upside-down on top of the hole in the top of the hive. It sort of functioned like a super, in a way. The bees came up and made a fantastic city of comb in it. At the end of the year he took it off and turned it upside down, shooed out the bees, and there was his art.

More bee art: a bee-made vase. (Updated to add even more bee-altered art.)

“The forcipules… of Lithobius centipedes are too small and weak to penetrate human skin.” You know, I always thought that too. But it turns out that if a good-sized one nails you right in the relatively delicate skin near your fingernail, it can draw blood. And then the itch comes. I’m not quite as pro-centipede as I was yesterday.

Josh and I adopted a P-Patch plot in Picardo Farm. I wanted to have somewhere to garden while we slowly rearrange our own garden beds, and I thought it’d be a good way to meet more of our neighbors, get good gardening advice, and perhaps apprentice to one of the beekeepers. In a fit of ambition, I reserved one of the year-round plots, and it turned out to be a pretty good mess. The guy who used to have the plot was pretty old and perhaps not particularly vigorous — certainly not particularly tidy. I think he just plain gave up sometime last summer. Quackgrass is everywhere, in thick stands, and there’s a ton of morning glory with big, juicy-looking roots. Out of a 10×20 space, Josh and I took out a full garbage bag of plastic trash and a bag and a half of the really nasty weeds. I don’t know how many bins of non-noxious weeds we’ve taken out to the compost there. And don’t get me started on the rotting wood. We put in several hours this weekend, and there’s still plenty of quackgrass to root out of there.

But there are also raspberries (lots of raspberries), blueberries, some huge rhubarb plants, and tulips. The light is great, and the soil’s fantastic.