Catch – 22’s Too! – Earthly Comforts

Fascinating Musings

Season 1 – Friday – 02/12/22

Willow Garden – flower’s awaiting to be planted in soils, worm farm awaiting to be resited, tower farm awaiting to be harvested and soils needing to be transferred to the allotment.

BUT it’s still WET!

The enormous rug!

I have a month of 2022 left, or to be a pedant about it – 29 days. Those days need to be well spent, unlike many of the days of last month. November was excessively wet. Kent experienced flooding and that caused more delays. I experienced flooding and delays, never mind everyone else.

Well, l was and wasn’t. I was delayed because I wanted to avoid having to worry and fuss about getting everything that needed to be done and have time to spare with the arrival of the end of the year.

Alas, nature is not working with me. The jobs l have wanted to have completed with time to spare before the end of 2022 were – Gazen Salts building and woodshed, a lower priority but still needing to be done. Willow garden, worm farming transfers to new farms, compost bins reshuffled and realigned, new soils added to the raised beds with sufficient spare time to allow for them to settle before being used and finally, bark chipping the allotment ready for the new year.

Where are we on that scale of achievement?

Willow Garden 95%
Worm Farms 80%
Compost Bins 0%
Raised Beds New Soils 0%
Bark Chipping Pathways 0%
Gazen Salts Hut 99%
Gazen Salts Wood Shed 0%

If Suze and l get a break for the better part of December, then all of these tasks can be completed by the end of the year, and if we don’t, we will not be done and dusted and might not finish off some of them until mid to end January.

To the casual reader, this will not seem like a massive problem in how the whole world runs, but things like this are all chain connected, so to progress in other areas, former projects must be completed first.

It’s not disastrous, it’s not the end of the world is nigh stuff, but it is bothersome and frustrating. The continuance of heavy rains is starting to have a significant knock-on effect on the grounds. Willow is now waterlogged, her table is breached, and she is flooding with very little recovery time between monsoon-like weather fronts and the rarer dry weather spells.

Suze and l have not been to the allotment since Friday, the 18th of November, which is two weeks today. Not a biggie, but there are tasks needing to be completed still in Stage 2 before we can start Stage 3.

The three new worm farms have all been built, two are now housing residents, but the third and final is awaiting the emptying off of the last tower farm before it can move into location – that task is time and space critical and is part of a chain process.

We need to be able to move the equipment sitting in the alleyway down to the allotment to clear the same space ready for the last farm harvest – we can’t due to heavy rainfall day in and day out over the previous four days.

The Willow garden herself is mostly a finished job. There are just a few flowers to be planted, which we can’t do just yet because of the saturated grounds.

The woodchipping project turned into a disaster and a no-go for many reasons.

The main one being the logs l wanted to buy are simply too soggy to be effectively chipped, meaning l must now buy between three to four tons of bark chippings to have delivered to the spare space at Gazen Salts instead. They would take two years to dry out!

A friend of mine will be crafting new lids for the worm farms, but he can only proceed once we have drier weather because he builds in his garden…

It’s not life-threatening. No one will die if they don’t get done, but the continued cold rainfall can hamper positivity. I am still good, and l am nowhere near hanging myself from the nearest oak, but you can’t help but feel about the irony of Joseph Heller’s Catch – 22 at times nor can you deny feeling somewhat depressed at the sheer volumes of water that is being dumped onto the lands.

You know?

On the lighter side of life … Suze is one of these people that needs change in the house furnishings … l am not bothered, although the house is undergoing significant changes because the man who moved into Willow in June 2020 no longer lives here, so change, therefore, is inevitable.

But for me, it’s not so much furnishings. It is pictures on the wall; many are no longer who l am, and so many are now going or being moved into different locations in the house.

However, Suze wanted to change the upstairs office around and, more importantly, to lay a rug that l bought for her birthday in 2015 that had been rolled up since she left her house last year to move here. But it is a huge rug, which meant that everything already in the small office area had to be moved out so the room could be empty to lay it.

However, we have bits and bots that need selling as we are going through a minimalising phase again and are significantly decluttering. This meant that the small upstairs corridor, the bathroom, Suze’s bedroom and mine became the new vantage points of storage.

You would think l would be better at the moving around lark by now, given the enormity of the hut at Gazen Salts. Of course, the difference is that the shed isn’t working with confined space issues. We are!

However, as is many times with Suze, we do laugh. We laugh at ourselves equally as much as we laugh at the antics of the other person. Humour is the best medicine to get through all the nonsense this world throws us!

“No darling, l am not stuck it’s just that my groin doesn’t quite stretch like this and my knees are no longer as young as they used to be and neither am l!”