My floor is covered in tools and sawdust and compost. This is usually a sign that things are going well. Today my amazing friends Penny and Mark borrowed their friend Glen's truck and tools and trekked to South Philadelphia.

They collected me, and we ventured forth to the Philadelphia Organic Recycling Center in Fairmount Park. This place, even ( Read more... )

I'm reading The Secret Garden for the first time in something like twenty years. It was given to me by my aunt. She has always lived terribly far away: it came in the post in a box wrapped in brown paper. It was the first book I ever read that contained such a limited number of pictures. There was a solemnity to the object, then, before I ever read ( Read more... )

I'm drinking a bottle of the cider I started brewing in... February? March? Cider is more like wine than beer, so you can ignore it for as long as you like and, as it will only keep improving in flavour and alcohol content, you get to feel productive the entire time. I'm not sure I'd realised quite how long I'd been ignoring it, though. I only just ( Read more... )

Today I stayed in bed with my partner until one. I then had a proper, civilised lunch of exciting cheeses, some good bread, honey, olives, roasted peppers, and grapes. I went outside to play in the dirt and do the first work on my new community garden plot. The edges were straightened and expanded to encompass the full space allowed, weeds were ( Read more... )

I very recently inherited my family's copy of the original Square Foot Garden. I remember that garden, three plots planted diagonally, directly in the middle of my family's back yard. I remember eating snap peas and running into tomato plants in an attempted backwards dash across the yard. I was probably about five. I knew that my family had done ( Read more... )

My garden is small but good. My mother just gave me a gift of herbs growing in a pot far nicer than the ones I usually manage to salvage. I spent a couple of days recently cleaning up the abandoned lot next to my house. I found construction materials from the people who refurbished my house, cement and paint poured onto the ground, beer bottles and ( Read more... )

My gods are silent and distant, and at times I hate them for it ( Read more... )

Stopping to consider the mostly unopened morning glories, wondering if I was awake earlier than they or if I had just missed them, I watched a bee squirm inside a few of them, bulging the sides out, barely welcomed. I like the insides of flowers. It's like looking up someone's skirt with absolutely no idea of what one might find there: a thousand ( Read more... )