Living on the land

September 2, 2006

Whenever I visit anywhere else I am pleased that my feet and fingernails are smooth and clean. It is quite different here; it rains intermittently and we are both out for several hours each day. In the pasture Andy tracks down the soda apples, an invasive weed. He fixes the fences and takes his chain saw to trim back fallen wood. He mows the pastures and the verges of our mile long driveway.
Beginning of September, and it is time to get the vegetable garden in. Even though I have been attending to the garden all summer, mulching, weeding and anticipating, the hard work is now before me. It is tropical heat and humidity so I try and get in three hours of work early in the morning.
We are so dirty all the time! This is Florida muck- black, sandy, clingy. I have to bleach just about everything and each of us uses at least three changes of clothing each day. And it is a major time burner to pick the 'hitch hikers' off our clothing.
Today I finished the work of getting everything out of the vegetable garden to be ready for the new arrivals. The beautiful, but marred with mildew, zinias had to go. There were several eggplants still producing, as well as peppers, so I left those. I put in three new tomato plants and some very hot peppers. By this time I was definitely wilting in the sun so I spent the next couple of hours pruning the plants by the swimming pool, adding compost to the containers,attending to the mealy bugs on the key lime tree, cleaning the pool deck. By now it was time to shuck off my clothes and go for a long cooling swim.
Going back to the house I noticed so many areas needing pruning back. Living here in the near tropics one needs to beat back the wild growth every single day. Showering on the back porch, I noticed the grape vines all over the place- little shop of horrors! Wasp nests over the shower head, barking tree frogs right here, some shoes left over from a few weeks ago, now enclosed by grape tendrils.
I love living here where the air is sweet, the stars are vivid, the creatures make room for me. I love doing the hard physical labor it takes to make this my home. I think I may even be able to come to term with the cows!