I swung my legs over the side of the bed on Sunday morning and immediately felt a muscle spasm. I felt one more, then it subsided; so I rolled out my yoga mat and lay down, face first, to let my back relax. After a few minutes I tried getting up, and that was successful with only slight twinges, so I went to my computer and googled: back spasms. I found a 14 step treatment that seemed pretty good. Since my back didn’t stay in a spasm, I really only did the first two steps, which were lie down and ice the back. I’ve had issues with my lower back before so whenever I contemplate a project like Phase One, that’s what worries me. I am not super afraid of hard work (really, I’m not!), but I’m very afraid of back pain. Before starting work on Thursday, I made sure to warm up my back with a few exercises. I found a “Jock”-type warm-up and incorporated some yoga techniques and poses into it. Just a 10 minute warm-up makes a big difference, especially if you are starting heavy work early in the day, because after lying in bed all night most of us are pretty stiff. The twinges I experienced today were probably nothing compared to what I might have suffered had I not warmed up my back, both Thursday and Friday. If I want to stay fit enough to garden for many years, I need to keep doing these ab/back strengthening exercises as part of my routine. A little cardio probably wouldn’t hurt either…
Virginia lent me a pile of gardening books when she came over last week, and I’ve been making my way through them. Lots of good information in there. One book is by Larry Hodgson, a self-proclaimed, *”Lazy Gardener“, which is a title I considered for this blog, but naturally it was taken! He talks about the ‘lasagna’ technique of starting new garden beds more or less the way we did it, only with layers of newspaper instead of bio-degradable geo-textile. I’ve done that before and it works, but I found that the newspaper didn’t necessarily break down as fast as I thought it would, especially when I forgot to water it regularly. It’s surprising how long it takes dry newspaper to compost! When we were digging up the front yard, we found quite a few matted bits of newspaper I had placed there years ago in an unsuccessful try at the same technique.
I like Hodgson’s idea for a perennial garden: set it up so you hardly have to do any maintenance. Have good soil to start with (or amend it so it’s better), plant the perennials close together so weeds can’t take hold, choose the right perennials for the location, then mulch, mulch, mulch! He doesn’t believe in dead-heading; he says the popular wisdom (that I have espoused) that the spent blooms drain the plant’s energy is hogwash. Logically, he must be right, because nobody’s going around dead-heading in the forests and the flora seem to truck along just fine. I will persist in my habit of dead-heading anyway, mostly because I prefer the look of the garden without all those dead blooms, and also to inhibit those crazy self-sowers I’ve talked about before. If you don’t cut off the heads of obedient plants, chives and bachelor’s buttons, to name but a few, you will regret it! Still, it’s a relief to know that there’s no shame in being a lazy gardener!
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