Gardening | marieqrogers

Posts Tagged ‘Gardening’

Forest Bathing or How I Cope with the Corona Virus

Posted in Marie's Musings, tagged Corona Virus, Covid 19, Forest Bathing, Gardening, Mindful Meditation, Mycobacterium vaccae, Nature Therapy, Shinrin-yoku, Sulfur Water, To-do Lists on March 24, 2020| 1 Comment »

Forest bathing, a form of Nature Therapy, has been around as long as people have lived in the woods. The Japanese call it Shinrin-yoku, or “taking in the forest atmosphere.” It’s a great way to cope with stress. I’m sure that’s what made Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond so therapeutic.

A nice place to bathe.

Today, everyone blogs about how they’re coping with Covid 19. I follow several blogs. Some folks, who used to post weekly or monthly, have taken to posting every day. I suppose that’s how they cope, but I don’t have time to read them all. You might say I cope with my bulging inbox by ignoring some of them. Sorry, fellow bloggers.

I follow all the health guidelines, but I don’t obsess about the virus. It’s been years since I had a cold or flu. Not because I haven’t been exposed. The past two flu seasons, I’ve gone to the elementary school to work with the children’s school gardens and found half the staff and student body out with the flu. Most of the teachers wore masks. They offered me one, but I declined. Although children hugged and touched me all day, I didn’t get sick. (I just hope my luck holds out!)

Several things keep me healthy. One is my well water. Sometimes people who come to the house mention the taste or smell of sulfur, but I’m so used to it I don’t notice. Sulfur water is good for you.

Another is gardening. Besides the enjoyment, there are scientific reasons why gardening makes us feel better. Healthy soil has bacteria that interact with our bodies, boosting our moods and immune systems. How these bacteria get into the body, scientists aren’t sure. They may interact with the skin or we may inhale or ingest them.

One organism they’ve studied is Mycobacterium vaccae. Scientists have fed M. vaccae to mice and found they have less anxiety and perform better in mazes. They’ve isolated a fatty acid in M. vaccae that binds with receptors in immune cells, locking out chemicals that cause inflammation. They think they can use this to make an anti-stress vaccine. But don’t wait for a vaccine—you can buy M. vaccae supplements!

When we garden together, the children get their hands in the dirt. This contributes to their health. Presently, schools are closed and parents are trying to homeschool their offspring. I hope when they get tired of them underfoot, the parents send the kids outdoors into the sunshine and fresh air to get dirty.

Another thing that keeps me healthy is living in the middle of five acres of woodland. Although confined at home, I have freedom. Forest bathing is an everyday thing for me.

My house in the woods.

Up until a few weeks ago, I was busy with many volunteer activities. So busy, at times I threatened to go back to work so I could get some rest! Or I wished the world would stop long enough to let me catch my breath. Be careful what you wish for.

At the beginning of the month, my calendar for March and April was so full I barely had a day each week to just stay home. Church, Garden Club, Master Gardeners, Writers Alliance—all had demands. This doesn’t include personal and family things, and writing.

I made to-do lists. Lots of lists. On one piece of paper I had five lists. On another, six.

Stop the world! I want to get off!

I was kidding! Really. I just wanted a little relief, some time to myself. Could I be personally responsible for this worldwide shutdown?

Leaves of three–don’t bathe with me!
Poison Ivy

Overnight, everything was cancelled, through April, maybe May, or beyond. No meetings. No plant sale. No school gardens. No granddaughter’s softball games. No church services. (These are being broadcast over Facebook, but I don’t have to go anywhere, just stay home and watch.) Days and days without obligations, nowhere to go, no one to see. I’m an introvert, happy to be by myself with my thoughts.

Virginia Creeper is a good neighbor.

Many people have problems with social isolation. Not me. But I’m not totally isolated. There is telephone and internet. I’m in contact with people every day and there’s still work to be done: approve the Garden Club budget, field questions and information, tend to Writers Alliance business that must go on, etc. I stay busy, but it’s so nice not to have to go somewhere every day. I can wear old clothes and forget makeup and deodorant. I take naps. I’m a hermit. I love it.

I can’t sit still long enough to binge on Netflix. I may watch an hour or two a night, or I may just read. I also listen to self-improvement podcasts. That’s where forest bathing entered the equation. Towards the end of one podcast, the guru said. “Now go out and do some Forest Bathing.” Isn’t that what I’ve been doing?

I write outdoors as much as possible. I’m writing this on my laptop on the porch. I’m moving my houseplants outside. I’m making attempts at vegetable gardening, even though last year the wildlife harvested more than I did. I walk the quarter mile down my driveway to the mailbox. Even though I’m mostly in the shade, my skin is showing signs of tan.

My driveway

But when I googled Forest Bathing, I realized I was leaving out an important factor: mindful meditation. I shouldn’t just scurry around getting my hands dirty. I need to make mindful contact with the soil, breathe deeply, close my eyes, feel the sun on my skin, listen to the birds and beasts that share my little paradise. Smell the wild azaleas.

Native wild azalea.

But many of you are still in the throes of winter, or you live in cities where you can’t get out in nature. What can you do? Get a houseplant. Start a tomato plant on your windowsill. Open a window for a few minutes and drink in fresh air. Use your mind to forest bathe. Imagination can be powerful. Close your eyes and picture yourself in the woods. Take a hot bath and pretend you’re basking in a hot spring in the mountains. Make plans to get out into the wild once this is over. Hold to that possibility. This, too, shall pass.

You can also read a good book that takes place in nature. I have a suggestion: Trials by Fire. The story will take you out of yourself and into a wilderness far, far away.

Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

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Blueberries

Posted in Marie's Musings, tagged Bees, Blackfork AR, Blueberries, Family Heritage, Gardening, Memories, Nature, Wildlife on May 31, 2017| 4 Comments »

I guess I need to plant more blueberries. The other night, I dreamed I was buying organic blueberries for $3 a pint. “That’s a good price,” I said. My father didn’t think so. He was thinking 20^th century prices. Behind the table where the blueberries were displayed in my dream was a poster about growing blueberries. “You really should, you know,” said Dad. I had to agree with him.

My dad was a real character. He could be cantankerous, especially in his later years. Although he dropped out of high school, he was one of the most intelligent men I’ve known, and he never stopped learning. He didn’t see much value in fiction, but he read things that interested him. He was definitely a male chauvinist. He didn’t put much stock in daughters, expecting them to marry and become another man’s responsibility, but he expected his sons to become partners in his businesses. I don’t know why—he left his parents’ farm and went his own way, to the disappointment of his father. His sons followed suit and went their own ways, leaving only daughters to help out.

The last picture I took of Dad, with two of his farmhands (granddaughters).

He was jealous of people with a college education. He’d call them “edjicated fools.” He especially saw no sense in a girl going to college, but I went anyway. Before I retired, I told him I might go back to graduate school. He said, “Why? You can learn anything you want to know on your own. There’s always the internet.” And this came from a man who hated computers! I concede he was right on this one. Most anything I want to know I can find on my own, on the internet or the old fashioned way, in books. I don’t need more letters behind my name, nor do I want another career, except writing. Maybe that’s why I listened to him when he said I should grow blueberries.

Although he grew up on a farm, the only farming he did before he “retired” was beekeeping. He liked honey and always wanted his own beehives. When I was a teenager, a swarm of bees flew though our yard and he caught them. From this first hive, he expanded to a successful honey business. The lure of farming never left him and he eventually bought a farm in Blackfork, Arkansas. Most people retire to Florida. My parents retired from Florida to Arkansas and my sister and her husband took over the bee business. Dad tried to establish a honey business in Blackfork but, no one is sure why, honeybees wouldn’t thrive there.

You’ve heard the expression, “God put me on earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now, I’m so far behind I’ll never die.” I lived by this axiom for years. Look at Dad. At the age of 80, he had more projects going than anyone knew. His parents had lived to 95 and 96 and I expected Dad to make it to 100. I also considered my prospects promising, as long as I followed his example. When talking about how busy I was, I’d say, “It’s not that I have too many irons in the fire. It’s that I have too many fires.” I too could live forever!

Dad sorely disappointed me when he exited this world at 81. The day of his funeral, the farm was suddenly full of honeybees. They must have come from miles around to pay their respects. Then they went away and never came back.

In the years since, many times I’ve wished I could talk with him. I miss calling him up and saying, “What do you think about this?” I wonder what he would think about what’s going on in the world. At times I’m glad that he didn’t live to see certain things.

Lately I’ve heard a lot about the virtues of blueberries. My property is just right for blueberry bushes. Wild ones grow in my woods. A few years ago I bought five commercial plants and three of them survived neglect, drought, and late spring freezes. A few more might make the effort worthwhile.

Gardening in the woods has its challenges—finding enough areas of sunshine and battling wildlife. I had a nice patch of strawberries once, until wild hogs plowed them up and destroyed them. The few survivors were too traumatized to live. I planted a lily bed which the armadillos dug up. So I went to container gardens and raised beds. A crop of broccoli was almost ready to harvest when the deer ate them down to bare stems. So I put chicken wire over the beds. The deer squashed that down to feast on my carrot tops. In this constant battle of wits, the dumb animals are one move ahead of me.

Other people have a problem with deer eating their blueberries. Not me. Besides vegetables, they eat my ornamentals, even my succulents, but so far no one has eaten, dug under, or plowed up my blueberry plants.

Maybe it’s worth a shot. Thanks, Dad.