MindSpinner

Today my three-wheeled car was towed away for repair, leaving the driveway looking as if it has no purpose at all, unless we’d like to take up roller blading. I feel like a bird that’s had her wings clipped, but we haven’t really suffered. A colleague whose daughter I have transported many a time is giving me rides back and forth to school, and the grocery store is just a half mile or so away. I made a grocery run on foot for the first time this morning. Buying in bulk is now out of the question, and as I toiled homeward with four bags of groceries, I looked a little longingly at the wheel barrows for sale across the street at our neighborhood hardware store. At Kroger, I found myself evaluating purchases by weight and not just cost and desirability, and I left my Light Cran-Grape juice on the shelf. It isn’t so light if you have to carry it along with milk and other goodies.

By tomorrow afternoon, I will have a new wheel to replace the damaged one (damaged by what I do not know, other than the hammer wielded at Wal-Mart). The condition of the tire, once re-inflated, remains to be seen. If that’s also shot, we’ll be stuck for another day. That’s fine, too.

This brief no-wheels interlude has made me think a little harder about what life may be like a year or two down the road, when gas may well be $100 or $200 a barrel. The issue won’t be merely whether I have enough money to fill the tank of a Corolla; it will be whether I can afford the rising cost of everything. I’m gradually trying to ready our yard to grow some of our own food in raised beds and in the kitchen garden which is actually just one big raised bed with stone paths curving through it. This year my garden goals are these:

1. Begin growing vegetables in raised beds: squash, corn, beans, and fingerling potatoes.
2. Protect our grape vines, using Super-Light Insect Barrier fabric sold by Gardens Alive, from the voracious Japanese beetles that consumed every leaf last summer.
3. Harvest our first full crop of peaches. Last year the first peaches appeared but were too badly damaged by insects to be edible. I’m bagging the fruit this year to protect it. I’ve stapled on about 25 brown lunch bags so far after cutting them down so that they are almost square. This is slow and painstaking, though I’ve tried it a couple of different ways, because peaches don’t grown on much of a stem. I’m afraid the bags will blow off in the first storm. (A downpour is testing them right now, but there’s no wind.) I’m also going to try Japanese Apple Bags ($7 per 100), and, for the sake of experimentation, I’m going to fashion my own re-usable bags out of the insect barrier fabric I’m buying to protect the grapes. If the insect barrier fabric is strong enough, those bags would be reusable. I like the idea of the fruit getting light and a bit of air. Time will tell which of the three methods works best.
4. Figure out how to preserve certain foods without refrigeration through the winter (After some research today, I’m theorizing that big coolers can be used to serve as root cellars in my unheated garage.)
5. Adjust the backyard landscaping plan to incorporate disease resistant dwarf apple trees. Given the fact that we have deer, I may end up planting these in the dogs’ fenced play yard. I think I can figure out how to protect the trees from the dogs, who will not be intent on eating the apples, and I do believe the deer will stay out.
6. Start composting.

It’s true that we may end up moving at some point, but if we do, there will be some buyer out there who wants the garden I’m creating, and it will be the garden that sells the house, which itself is otherwise interchangeable with many others in this town, right down to the floorplan. As long as I am here, the garden will be a work in progress.