Hiya, Rural Sprout Readers,
It’s early, and the house is still quiet. I’ve got my coffee, and I’m curled up in a chair in the living room, watching another gray sky dawn here in Pennsylvania. We’ve had lots of rain this week. The ground is completely saturated out at my sweetie’s house.
While that’s great now, we all know there will come a point soon when the garden needs to be watered.
And that’s the conversation my sweetheart and I had in the middle of the hardware store the other day. He said he wasn’t looking forward to standing in the heat watering the garden again this year. He wanted to look into a way of automating the process.
He started talking about individual soaker lines and sensors that would measure moisture in the soil and how he could hook it up to his weather station. I think there may have been graphs that I could reference too.
My sweetie is an engineer, can you tell?
He was looking at watering the garden as a problem. I listened, growing more and more nervous about his ideas and plans. To him, it was a dreadful task, and our lives would be easier if he figured out how to automate it.
All I could picture was electronic gizmos all over my beautiful garden.
Finally, I stopped him in the middle of the aisle and said, “I know you don’t like watering the garden, but I do. For you, it’s a problem, a chore, but for me, it’s how I start my day. It’s how I drink my coffee – my mug in one wand, the watering wand in the other.”
He’s still learning this whole gardening thing. And for him, the motive is purely food and self-reliance driven. Standing there in the hardware store aisle, he began to understand that for me, the joy is in the tending and the work and the planning.
It’s the act of gardening that makes me happy, not necessarily enjoying the fruits of my labor.
Don’t get me wrong, I love all the fresh veggies too, but for me, gardening is all about the process and what I receive from it—peace, joy and dirt under my nails. Yes, I love making things easier but don’t take away my watering wand.
In the end, we agreed that I would water the garden, but he would look into building some sort of automated watering system for when we go on vacation. That way, I still get to greet my garden in my customary fashion every day, and he still gets to have a fun project to research and build.
You know, right after he finishes building a coop for these four cute balls of fluff that came in the mail this week.
How & When To Fertilize Blueberry Bushes For Buckets Of Berries
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Timing is everything when it comes to fertilizing your blueberry bushes to get the most fruit this summer.
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5 Things You Need To Know Before Moving Houseplants Outside In Spring
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Even houseplants deserve a little time outdoors, but take some precautions beforehand to make sure they make it back inside this fall.
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24 Reasons Why Your Tomato Plants Are Dying & How To Fix It
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One of the most popular plants to grow in the home garden can also cause the most headaches. We'll get those tomatoes back on track.
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8 DIY Butterfly Feeder Ideas + 5 More Ways To Attract Butterflies
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Attract more of these beautiful flying insects to your garden.
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Transplanting Seedlings Outside: 11 Essential Steps For Success
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Get your garden off to a great start by ensuring your seedlings get off to a great start.
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That's all for this week, Rural Sprout Readers.
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