2021: The Strangest Gardening Season
This has been a strange gardening season for us for a multitude of reasons. We began the year with my parents intending to list the house for sale. With the potential to have to move in the middle of the gardening season, we decided it would be best to minimize planting this year, so we wouldn’t potentially leave behind a ton of work for new owners, and also so we wouldn’t have to put a ton of work into things we wouldn’t get to harvest.
But, as I sit here writing this on September 1st, I’m still staring out at the same garden and yard. It's been raining, windy, and stormy all day so far. The house comes off the market in a few days, and we’ll take the winter off and try again next spring.
There was no crowd of seedlings in the kitchen this spring as we didn’t start anything from seed this year. We bought a few tomato plants and some basil for the greenhouse, and when it came time to plant the garden, we only put in 4 rows:
Beans (that were supposed to be purple)
Peas
Carrots
Beets & Swiss Chard
Record-Breaking Heat Wave
Besides it being a strange and empty year in the garden, it was also strange weather-wise too. In late June, a heat dome swept across most of Canada, and I think most of the Northern US as well. Many towns and cities set records for all-time high temperatures. Lytton, BC, set records for several days straight, and then almost the entire town burned to the ground from out of control forest fires. I’ve taken to calling it fire season now, not summer.
The heat dome meant that Lacombe’s daytime temperatures hovered between 28 and 35ºC for almost a whole week. We usually get a few days of 30+ temperatures in Lacombe, but not usually until the end of July or the beginning of August. The heat stunted our peas badly. We set up a 4-foot wire for our peas to climb. Usually, they’re past the top and falling back on themselves. We wouldn’t have needed the wire; they topped out at about 14 inches tall.
The carrots didn’t love the heat either; only about half the row developed. The beats and chards and dill seemed more than happy to grow in the weird weather. We thought we’d planted purple beans (purple seeds in a ziplock from a friend), but it turns out they were actually yellow—none of us like yellow beans. We picked a few for pickling. Last week I mowed them down with the lawnmower and then tilled them into the garden soil. The birds planted a thick crop of sunflower seeds in the garden, so they’ve been quite happy with the dense cluster taking up about ¼ of the garden space. We don’t mind.
The greenhouse has been a bit neglected this year. We’ve been watering it, though not as often as we should. And the tomatoes plants are producing fruit now, but since we didn’t fertilize as much as we should have, they’re not producing as much as we usually get. Speaking of fertilizer…
Biggest 2021 Gardening Regret: Getting Rid of My Compost Bin
When we first worked the garden in the spring, I emptied the compost bin and hauled it out to the road. I put a free sign on it, and someone took it. I didn’t like the bin we had, and I thought we’d be moving, so I didn’t replace it. I really regret that.
The soil in our greenhouse is really depleted. We haven’t changed it out or added anything to it in probably a decade, which is why we end up using a lot of fertilizer for our tomatoes. If I had kept that dang compost bin, I’d have enough compost by now to put a nice thick layer on all the greenhouse beds.
Burnout
Between the pandemic, financial stress, and work stress, I burned out hard this summer. I crashed in mid-august and had to ask for a significant reduction in my writing assignments. It's been about two weeks now that I’ve been attempting to recover. I can see little indicators that I am starting to recharge. But I’m still pretty braindead and feel constantly exhausted.
Less work also means less money, so while I’m having a bit of brain break, I’m also having a lot of financial stress, which is almost certainly making recovery slower and harder. But I guess it is what it is. I couldn’t sustain what I was doing before, so there’s no way I could recover if I had kept the same workload.
I’m in a bit of limbo right now. Wondering how to pivot my career so I can keep what I love about working for myself:
Working from home
Setting my own schedule
Not having an alarm
Learning about topics I’m passionate about
Tons of autonomy
And also wondering what I can do besides writing, which is also exciting and fulfilling, but that will pay drastically better.
I don’t love the idea of going back to a full-time corporate job. I REALLY don’t want to have to go into an office again and work set hours. I hated everything about that style of work. But I’m feeling a little lost for ideas.
A few people have recommended that I try to find some editing work since that’s a little less mentally taxing than writing. I’ve realized this year that writing is genuinely the most mentally exhausting work I’ve ever done. For me, 2 hours of writing is as mentally exhausting as 8 hours at any of the office jobs I’ve had in the past.
So, I have no idea where the last quarter of 2021 will take me. It's been a strange year, in the garden and the rest of my life. I’m tired; I think everybody is tired. I don’t know where we go from here, but I hope we can all start getting some rest soon.