Gardening through the rough patches

In its own very personal, myopic way, it's been a rough couple of weeks. Very stressful. I don't like to write too much about the internal stuff because it's boring. It really is. The point is, late one afternoon this week I went up to the roof and I gardened. It was like taking a calming pill. I think. I'm not very familiar with pills.

I wore a jacket of Vince's, too big for me, but waterproof, and the longer I stayed the more drips ran down my forehead from my hair. It wasn't cold. It was spring-like, and I looked up often and saw a grey wall over the harbour, obscuring Governor's Island and the water,  until I looked up again and saw the wall breaking up and lifting and turning into layers of low cloud.

I sipped from my drink, a concoction of gin and San Pellegrino pompelmo (grapefruit). My hands were dirty, and wet. I left mud on the glass and on the pocket of Vince's coat where I returned the unused seed packets - I held off on planting lettuce as we're expecting several more freezes. But the fava beans and peas and chervil  are in, and so is the spicy mesclun  blend of hardy brassicas.

And I breathed. And looked up and out. I have not been doing enough of that. I have been looking in. And I have not given myself a view. Or gardened.

I must garden. It is as simple as that.

I have heard from and about many people who have been having a difficult time recently. For me, this work - labour with promise -  helped. Things seemed to straighten out on the roof, as I shook plant food into the damp soil, and troweled it in and pushed the seeds down, and stretched chicken wire, and looked across the water, and imagined small green crops to come.

In other seed news: We have two Botanical Interests seed winners! Lyn, and Meg. I've contacted them and am waiting for some mailing addresses.

Thanks you to everyone for playing - lots of really lovely green ideas for making crops into meals. The winners were chosen at random.

Meg wrote, about what she would do with her seeds: "I would love to roll some home-made sushi with the addition of fava and pea shoots, and add a melange of microgreens. Probably with smoked salmon, and avocado. Maybe even find a way to sneak in a rat-tail pod. (They sound like a furtive ingredient to me... until found out, of course.)"

So - I hope they both have fun with furtive Rat Tail radishes. I have my own, and should plant those too.