gardens

I love gardening.  There's something magical about being able to see gorgeous plants grow out of virtually nothing, keep them healthy, and be rewarded with the most local food of all.  

Okay, so The Guy actually does a lot of the plant maintenance.  That's not my fault!  I have a longer commute.  And stuff.  

Anyway, I wanted to take you on a mini tour of what we've got growing.  

First up, we have the Great Tomato Jungle on the back porch.  The seedlings were originally purchased from the farmer's market, and were mislabeled.  I thought I was getting heirloom tomato plants (the ugly, bulbous, multicolored, ungodly delicious ones), but they turned out to be cherry tomatoes.  And as it turns out, cherry tomato plants like to take over the universe!  It's unreal.  We have our very own thicket of tomatoes.   One was also planted in an upside-down-tomato thingie, and it promptly grew all the way down to the ground.  These plants are unreal. 

So, so many tomatoes.  These pictures were taken a little while ago, when they were just starting to think about ripening.  We'd had to continually pinch off the flowers to keep them from over-extending themselves even more.  Lately we've been getting buckets of the juicy little ripe tomatoes, and have taken to throwing them in everything, and to grilling 'em on skewers for tomato sauce.  Yum.

Then there's the herb trough.  It's a nifty metal animal-watering sort of thingie, that we filled with dirt.  Grows stuff like you wouldn't imagine.  Earlier in the summer the chive plant set off on its own world-conquest plan, and we harvested armfuls of the stuff.  Much was chopped and dried --- one handy thing about the desert is that anything placed on a metal tray in the sun becomes beautifully dried in about an hour.  The porch table becomes practically a cooking surface.  The rest of the chives were mixed with butter and frozen, for a ready supply of chive butter.  Makes everything better.  That's a fact.

After the chives were thwarted in their evil plans, the basil plant took the opportunity to thoroughly dominate the herb-trough population.  There's also oregano, marjoram, and quite a lot of Italian parsley, but they're all eclipsed by the basil.  The only thing that's immediately apparent in this picture is some of the baby lettuces developing at the edge of the trough.  Witness the quite upwardly mobile basil:

And its cousin, across the yard.  Yes, that's a basil shrubbery.  I, for one, welcome our new basil overlords.

Ah, summer.  Grilled superfresh tomatoes + all the basil you can carry = the most delicious pasta sauce ever.   As autumn comes upon us, we will have to harvest the glorious basil, and it will probably be made into pesto.  Also, proto-pesto basil cubes, made by grinding the basil up with olive oil and freezing the concoction in ice cube trays, then popping them out into a freezer bag and tossing in the deep freeze.  Instant basil punch to whatever you're cooking!

out of sight

I've recently observed an interesting phenomenon when it comes to my own perspective on stuff:

• Is it out where I can see it, on a shelf/hanger/pile on the floor/hook where it usually lives?  Then I'll probably pass over it when decluttering, and will come up with all sorts of rationalizations as to why it should stay. 

• Has it been moved into a go-away box or pile?  Then I cease thinking about it entirely and can easily let it go.  

Let's call it Mindless Clutter Effect.  MCE means that simply walking into a room and declaring a decluttering mission by looking around (at least for me) is probably doomed.  But if I physically touch an object, and maybe move it to a different place?  Whole new ballgame.  Let's look at an example. 

For the past few months, I've been continually pulling things out of my closet and depositing them in an ongoing 'donate' box.  Every once in a while the box got dropped off at a thrift store.  The selection process was fairly random, and just happened whenever I'd think of something that could go.  I had to work up the motivation to actually remove the thing from the closet, while leaving everything else behind.  I even tried the backwards-hanger trick, but I tended to wear everything eventually if it's there for the wearing, so that was somewhat self-defeating.  Every thing gotten rid of this way required effort to move it. 

I managed to purge maybe 20 items in several months.  

A couple of weeks ago, some friends came over to help me in my closet-cleaning mission.  We physically removed every single thing from the closet (in batches by category) and laid it all in big piles on the bed.  Then every item was held up, maybe tried on, and voted upon.  Anything with any doubts about it (poor fit, unflattering, not something I've actually worn in a while, a generic 'blah' feeling) went into the go-away pile.  The rest was looked through again briefly to see how many were left, the less-awesome pieces were revisited, and then the stuff to keep was put back into the closet.  Each thing to be kept required the effort of putting it back in the closet.

The clothing was removed from its natural habitat and backdrop (the closet), and put into a new context (on the bed).  Such a simple change, but it (along with the support of having people there to help, of course), allowed me to remove at least a third of my entire wardrobe.  The pile above is what'll go into my yard sale when I get around to having one.

What's interesting is that even though the pile has been sitting in my bedroom, totally accessible and visible, I've felt no urge to pull anything out of it.  Things in the pile that I'd previously been unable to imagine getting rid of have become irrelevant.  MCE defeated.  

The moral of the story?  Try pulling clutter out of its original context.  You might be surprised at how much easier it is to part with unnecessary stuff.  Also, have fabulous friends who think going through someone else's closet is fun!

today I love...

...this guide to organizing a kitchen.  Check it out!  Shortly after changing my name, I write about geeky organizing.  Go figure.

I've moved a lot in my life, and consequently have set up quite a few kitchens.  Like the author of this article, I've pretty much always used the 'where will it physically fit?' method of deciding where things go.  Perhaps it's silly, but I find the notion of consciously organizing the space in order to group things near where they'll be needed and with the other objects they're used with seems pretty radical.

Kind of makes me want to reorganize the kitchen.  I get urges like that a lot.



Every Wednesday, I write about something I love that day.  It doesn't necessarily have to be remotely related to anything; it just has to be fabulous!