More on gardening and emotional distress

I am a bit anxious at the moment and my mood has been a bit up and down with normal triggers of uni stress and relationship stress. This means I've been trying extra-hard to fit bits of self-care into the busyness of my days. For exercise I have been trying to walk to the station rather than driving (a solid 15+ minute up-hill walk which is fine if it's not raining and I don't have too much to carry), I've been spending time around people who make me feel safe and good (hi Clare!) to feel socially connected, I've been careful with my alcohol consumption and sleep habits (apart from the very early wake-ups that I have minimal control over. I don't mind it on days I have to leave early, but it can be irritating on weekends). Keeping things around me reasonably neat and tidy can help with the anxiety but one of the most important things for me personally is a sense of self-efficacy. It's a common thing for depressed and anxious people to have difficulty with, both noticing the stuff they do manage to do, and building up the motivation to get things done. There are all sorts of 'tricks' to focusing on this stuff - from things as simple as writing a specially tailored to-do list (there were times when my list had nothing more than 'shower, eat lunch, pick kids up from school' so I could manage to get everything done) and to make the things you get done small and/or enjoyable. Getting a tangible result is another trick - if you manage to do the dishes you can really NOTICE.

You can see where this is going right? Gardening. It ticks so many boxes! Doing some weeding creates order out of chaos and channels bad feelings into a positive result (although on a bad day I once had to apologize through my tears to every weed as I pulled it out. For real. I think I went and did something with the compost that day). There is also a tangible result - a nice garden is a lovely place to be and it can get that way, slowly, without too much money, just a whole lot of time and hard work. On a good day when I weed the lawn every dandelion I remove is another dandelion that won't set seed. I acknowledge I'm taking tiny steps, but they are steps in a forward direction. Today I was smirking to myself, thinking that if the garden is a metaphor for my mental state then a therapist is the horticulturalist/tree lopper/lawn mowing guy who I pay to help me sort my shit out.

I've hardly done anything in the garden for the last year (after about three years of lots of time and effort) and it just feels great to be getting my hands dirty again, so apologies for hurriedly written posts the overstretched analogies.

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow

"To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow" is allegedly a quote by Audrey Hepburn. It sounds twee to me, even when I imagine it in her voice, but there is a really interesting current of truth running through it. I was weeding the other day and realised that if there was one thing I would recommend to anyone with what are coyly titled 'mental health challenges' it would be gardening.

I feel dealing with mental health challenges might be an area where I have something to add. I have always been interested in mood, thinking and feeling. I am studying mental health nursing at the moment, I have close friends and family who suffer from mental illnesses, varying in both type and severity and I have what gets termed 'lived experience' as well (if I were a therapist I would interrupt to ask me why I needed to justify myself. This is my blog, I shouldn't feel the need to recite credentials and yet.... Why?)

Anyhow, there are a bunch of things that are commonly agreed to promote good mental health, with the potential to aid in managing mental illness and promoting recovery

• Adequate exercise
• Appropriate sleep
• Diet - plenty of fibre, not too much sugar or saturated fat
• Avoiding alcohol and recreational drugs
• Medication as prescribed
• A sense of connection
• A sense of self-efficacy
• Mindfulness/meditation

And I actually think that gardening helps with every single one of these. Exercise is obvious to anyone who has ever been in a garden but sleep is more interesting. I know when I was very depressed sometimes I could get myself into the garden in the morning. Morning sunlight is thought to assist with regulating mood and daylight, again, especially morning light, helps to regulate circadian rhythms. If you find it hard to wake up in the day and impossible to sleep all night (common in situations of emotional distress) daylight can help, which means gardening can help, because gardening is a reason to be out in the daylight.
When you are gardening, grow veggies. If you can't grow veggies then grow herbs. It just might help you eat if that is difficult for you and if eating is too easy then having dirty fingers/grubby gloves means it's easier to pause. It's also easier to concentrate on the goodness of your food, rather than getting caught up in it's emotional value if you cook fresh food with herbs you grow yourself.
Gardening is never going to knock out your substance abuse habit or convince you to take the meds that cut your highs and lows and make you feel flat. Spending time in 'nature' is well known to increase feelings of connectedness and gardening is no different. It can increase feelings of self-efficacy too. Self-efficacy was one of the most important things when I was really depressed and anxious. I felt I couldn't DO anything, particularly anything that made a positive difference. Having seeds germinate, protecting a seedling from snails or staking a tomato plant was an observable thing, and I did it. It mattered to the plants.
Like exercise, mindfulness and meditation are a part of gardening. Weeding requires a type of mindful concentration but allows for meditative states. My lovely wise mother tells me that all the biggest decisions of her life were made while weeding. I tell my kids that it's a bit like playing the type of repetitive puzzle games that I play - I play them compulsively when I'm falling apart.

I could probably provide scholarly references for all of that but what I can't back up, but know in my bones, is that gardening helps. When my life is spinning wildly out of control, I can work methodically to get the clovers out of the lawn. When study stress is threatening to take over my life I joke to my uni friends about procrastigardening, Weeding is a relatively healthy and functional way to channel compulsivity, a manic episode could see trees pruned, lawns mowed, and who knows what built while depression might see nothing worse than more weeds than normal. This is starting to read like an impassioned plea for more community gardens and for employee flexi time for gardening but I actually think those things would enable us to handle our stressful lives a bit better.

So this thinking all came about when I was gardening the other day. I was actually marveling at how things are growing, even in the depths of winter, and pondering the wonderfulness of my terrific friends. My friends (you know who you are) are the people who would help me hide the bodies - both metaphorically and also possibly literally. I was thinking about how they pop up like four leaf clovers, lucky, rare and precious. I pick four leaf clovers when I find them, and feel smug and lucky, a similar feeling I have about my wonderful support network. As I was thinking these nice but somewhat self-congratulatory thoughts I came across a FIVE LEAF CLOVER. Never seen that one before!

This slightly chewed, odd, mutant miracle is for D.

Medication

So many times people ask me if I shouldn't 'have a rest' from my medication. These are often the same people who suggest people with depression should just remember how good they have it compared with people in Syria/current the international hotspot, or suggest that we harden up (We are the toughest people you will ever meet. We do battle with our own minds). The short answer is 'no' but it's slightly more complicated than that.

Imagine I was an asthmatic (I'm not).  Would anyone suggest I needed a rest from my preventer medication? Even if I wasn't getting symptoms or having asthma attacks no one would question the decision to be on medication, made in conjunction with the relevant health professionals. In fact, if I felt all better and started talking about stopping my preventer medication someone would remind me that without it I sometimes get really sick.

Have you ever thought an asthmatic should just toughen up and keep breathing? Have you thought they should just appreciate the oxygen they can get and stop worrying about what they can't have? Have you avoided talking about difficult subjects because you didn't want them upset, thinking it might trigger an attack? If an asthmatic needs to take some time off work or study while they get their symptoms under control how do you view it? What about if they decide they need to use a variety of approaches (medical and lifestyle) to deal with their illness? I have several friends who won't come to BBQs or bonfires on the cooler months because they say they can't breathe. I don't judge them negatively for that.

My illness isn't that different. I use meds, lifestyle and talk therapy to deal with it. When I have a major depressive episode I try to catch it as early as possible and put some things in place to help me manage while things are difficult. I try to remember, when I feel good, that my meds are preventative because when things are good it's easy to forget how bad things can get (what's that saying about forgetting pain?).

All that being said, there are many different ways to manage mental illness, and more and more research is being done on gut-brain interactions, and I am not going to criticize anyone who chooses to deal with their illness in other ways - as long as it is working for them and their loved ones!

Toadstools!

I've been getting my crafty on, partially due to my natural inclination, but I can't deny that Pinterest, a dry spell (no alcohol at all for a week), Christmas and school holidays haven't been major catalysts. 

After making the dinosaur habitat for us I got all excited and made fairy gardens for two families with little girls as their Christmas present. Nothing too overboard, just a few easy plants, some sparkly white pebbles, butterflies (shrinky plastic and florists wire) and air-dry clay magic toadstools and birdbaths. I thought I might so a little tutorial here while I still remembered what I did.

First I made the stem and the cap out of air drying clay. I didn't think too much about size, I just went with what felt comfortable in my hand.

Then I used water to make slip 'glue' to join the two pieces

After carefully joining the two pieces I inserted a wooden skewer. This was to enable me to stand them up in pot plants, obviously you couldn't use a wooden skewer if you were going to fire your clay.

It also made the toadstools easier to hold while I worked on them.

I used the pointy end of one of the skewers to make the gills of the toadstool. I got a bit fancy with some of them and made them a little more toadstool like.

They took ages to dry. For the first 24 hours they should dry under plastic to avoid cracking. You will know when they are dry because the colour will change to a much lighter colour (for this clay the pieces turned white) and they will not feel cool to the touch anymore.

You can see one of the birdbaths, a couple of christmas tree ornaments and a cheeky little gnome in there too.

I used student acrylic to paint them. I just painted the top of the caps red and gave them white spots, but you could get as crazy or as traditional as you liked at this point. I think I gave the red about two coats? And the white spots about four coats so they really stood out.

I varnished them, using a glossy varnish for the tops of the caps and a satin varnish for the rest of them. I was really pleased with the way they turned out.

Enjoy!

Dinosaur habitat

My sister Clare is in Cambodia and blogging, my mum is travelling and blogging, my friend Megan is planning the trip of a lifetime and will be blogging, so I thought a post was in order. None of that exotic travel for me at the moment though. My life is all about parenting my kids, gardening and trying to make our house more organised and liveable (hence my Pinterest addiction) and here is a little project we did yesterday afternoon that covers all those bases.

I had a tired grumpy four year old and wanted to look at wardrobe systems in Bunnings, so I bribed the tired kid with the promise that we would buy some little plants and make him a dinosaur garden. We also bought a wide-ish, flat-ish pot, which was unnecessary but I'll use it for bulbs next spring. I was drawing my inspiration from cool terrariums I'd seen on Pinterest and originally planned to use plants I had at home, but I just couldn't resist the mini mondo grass ($1) and a few small-leaved sedums as well as something called 'corsican mint' which is a tiny little thing ground cover thing. I wanted all small-leaved plants because I think the scale looks better (same reason I don't like large leaved bonsai).

I probably took us about 10 minutes to put together, including taking a blade to a disposable water bottle to make the pond and wandering around the garden looking for appropriate rocks.


I wish I had chosen a sealed pot with a base, rather than terracotta, so it was easier to put in the boys room (although that *might* be a recipe for disaster) and I might work on the pond a bit (make it much flatter and fill it with blue glass decorator bead things rather than actual water) but I'm pretty happy with it. More to the point, Kiz loves it, and has given all his dinosaurs drinks, baths, and plants to munch on.

Organic Gardening at our Place

Let me tell you a little secret: I don't have an organic garden. There, I've said it. It feels better to be out with it. Actually, even more shocking, I'm not really trying to have an organic garden. What I would like is a garden where herbicides and pesticides and commercial fertilizers just aren't needed. More of how I'm trying to get to that point later.

There are actually two main ways that my garden isn't organic. Firstly the typical way, where some of the things I put on my garden don't have organic certification. Certainly the compost I make isn't organic because I put in things to compost that aren't organically certified (fruit and veg are only part of it, last time I checked the SMH wasn't even claiming to be organic. In fact, some of those columnists are downright poisonous!) but also there is so much INORGANIC MATTER in my soil left from the last owners of the house, that I can only hope to minimise it, not to get rid of it entirely. The solid things like glass, metal and asbestos (!) aren't the biggest problem, more difficult to get rid of are the things the previous owners used to attempt to keep the weeds down. Well, I can only assume that they carpeted many of their garden beds in fake grass, or lined them with plastic, to keep the weeds down, although I may be wrong, they may just have had a very different aesthetic. The astroturf stuff is actually really problematic as sunlight (UV radiation) has started to break it down, leaving many thousands of little 'tufts' of fake grass throughout the soil of my garden. From my reading it seems that UV light breaks some of the polymer bonds, so the plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, which to me suggests that it gets into the food chain more easily. The problem with plastics getting into the food chain is far to big for this blog, but google on the gyre, pthaletes, BPA and endocrine disruption (Not safe for people with anxiety disorders! This is some freaky shit!). So, I remove what I can but I try not to think about it all to much so I don't wind myself into an anxious knot.

That green stuff is tufts of plastic grass

Given that I can't ever hope to have a garden that could be considered organic I do try and stay green in my garden. Just like I firmly believe in 'good enough parenting' (google it!) I am aiming for something I think of as 'organic enough gardening' which allows a certain amount of flexibility, considering what I'm working with. So I minimise the external inputs of pesticide, herbicides and fertilizer to saves energy, both in terms of production and transport and doesn't add even more weird chemicals to my garden. What I do, and plan to do is:

• Weeds: I manually weed my garden, use mulch and newspaper and I'm planning to try black plastic for some tricky bits too. High strength vinegar on a hot day is very effective on things that I can't get to easily in other ways (such as between the pavers). I'm also going to use green manure for some areas, so the weeds can't get a hold.
• Pests: Again, manual removal is excellent for insect pests. Apart from the decrease in pest numbers, it also means I spend more time in the garden. Obviously this isn't always possible, but as Peter Cundall says, just wandering around observing is very important for gardeners, so that's what I aim for. I am also doing things like a bit of companion planting (Marigolds! Yay!), exclusion (especially for chooks, possums, other birds and bandicoots) and hopefully the chickens will also help by eating insect pests.
• Fertility: We have two compost tumblers that are working well, and the added joy of chook poop means that we should have some really good quality compost by the begginning of summer. I do purchase sugar cane mulch, which I use for the hen house as well as the garden, but that should decrease when I start growing green manure and when my comfrey starts growing.

Currently we have two raised beds, soon to be three. One is planted out with lettuce seedlings, coriander seedlings and cucumber seeds the other is still resting so the compost has time to loose it's heat and the worms can start their work. We have some eggplant and capsicum/pepper seeds germinating inside and plans for sweetcorn, bush beans and sunflowers (I'll put the sunflowers out the front to protect them from the chooks and provide some much needed cheerfulness to our front yard). Yesterday the kids helped me plant some pretty, low maintenance, pollinator attracting, flower seedlings (a white, scented allysium, a small white salvia and a white and pink coastal daisy). We are also planning to put a tent-style trellis between two of the beds, made out of some weldmesh that we found hidden in our garden somewhere. We also have some herbs around the place and a potato tower that is growing brilliantly. I would also like a passionfruit vine, and I think that it would be nice near our front door, where it would enjoy the northerly aspect and keep a bit of our wall shaded.

Raised beds, with coop behind the clivias

Potato tower, needing mulch

Hen Happiness

I picked the 'chookens' up the day after my birthday, so we've had them here for about 10 days and I'm still  besotted.

Chook looking pissed off after
spending 40 mins in a box.

The people we picked them up from (City Chicks in Marsden Park) were just lovely. They showed me how to clip their wings, they let my little boys go exploring in their yard, showed them baby chicks and the advice they gave about feeding and husbandry all seemed very sane and matched with what I have read already.

The henhouse

We got home late afternoon and popped them in the coop. I fussed around trying to make sure they knew where food and water was located (we are using Dine-a-Chook and Wet-a-Chook for food and water - a bit different to what the chooks were used to, so I put some scratch grains (AKA chicken treats) around the feeder and even inside the feeder and the hens got the idea at once). The black chicken (an australorp cross) managed to escape and I realised that she was the feisty one. The kids had their first lesson in chicken catching (slow, quiet, no sudden movements and try to corner her) and I discovered that hunting a black hen through the shrubbery at dusk was something akin to trying to catch a shadow. Luckily it only took us a few nervous minutes!

The next morning I heard some noisy clucking, and when I went to check on the girls I found TWO EGGS! 

First Eggs!

We haven't had two eggs every day since, but we've had one egg most days (and one hen hasn't come into lay yet). When chooks are stressed they stop laying, so the fact that despite the big move, and despite the kids wanting to pat them and talk to them they are still laying, albeit not perfectly regularly, is fantastic.

Six year old learning to catch and carry a hen

They were named mostly by the boys - Kiz said he wanted the brown chooken to be called Henny Penny, so that was fine. I wanted the black one to be called Kali and Asher wanted them all to have the word 'hen' somewhere in their name so the Light Sussex became Henrietta and the black chicken became Henny Kali.

So far the thee chooks are doing everything I'm 'paying' them for. Providing eggs, teaching the kids about caring for animals and providing all of us with amusement (Asher said to me yesterday "We have the most fascinating chooks mum!"). Of course, I now need to get the planned raised beds with bird netting sorted pronto, and some more fencing organised - the chooks are scratching up my seedlings, stomping on my new lavender, discovering new and creative ways to escape, pooping in  remarkably inconvenient and I strongly suspect Henny Penny has started laying her eggs under a bush or somewhere because the last few days have only been one-egg-days. Despite all that, they are funny and friendly and the whole family is glad we have them.

The girls saw the treat bucket!

Chook-shed progress

Y’know how they say ‘measure twice, cut once’ well we now say ‘measure more than three times, AND get someone who isn’t hung-over to check your workings, before concreting once’ – because a concreted-in post is hard to move, and if you don't get it right you don't have much wiggle room. 

The high vis gear was just for show.

Despite small challenges such as these Michael and I worked hard and over two (part)days, we got the chicken coop floor installed on our steeply sloping, poorly terraced site. The shed itself is a kids kit cubby house that we are re-purposing. I then spent Sunday painting the trim and giving the inside a coat of this rather unpleasant cack yellow that I got very cheap at Bunnings. It’s just to protect the cheap pine from chickens, not for looks. The outside is a storm grey with white trim, and a green colourbond roof.

Installed floor, from above. The hole is chicken-access to what will be the secure run underneath.

The next steps are to cut pop doors for the chickens and egg collection in the walls of the cubby. There will be two chook doors and a person door – the two chook doors will be on different sides, so we have the option of making movable day runs, using chicken wire and star pickets. This should allow us more flexibility to do things like to rest the run area, maybe grow hen-fodder or even attach a broody box if we ever get that far (shhhh! don't tell my husband of my expansionist plans!). The person door will now need steps or a ladder - we ended up raising the hen house higher than planned.

After the pop-holes have been made we will touch up the paintwork then install the walls and roof. We are going to use weldmesh to screen the bottom part so that the chooks will have a fox proof area underneath the coop itself, for dust-baths as well as food and water. We are planning on raising the roof , gable and all,10cm or so, and putting mesh around the gap for ventilation. I can't really imagine a chook getting too cold in a Sydney winter, but I remember cubbies being pretty stuffy when I was a kid, and apparently stuffy is BAD for chooks. There is also a window that we will cover with weldmesh, a hole in the floor for the chickens to go downstairs and the plan is to cut a hole in the person-door to allow for ventilation. If we work out that it's not enough we will add more vents.

Installed floor, showing the sloping site.

The logistics of putting it all together will be more daunting than I expected too - I was thinking I could do it myself, with a bit of help from the lovely husband, but since it's all a bit higher than planned it's going to be more difficult.

I think I might end up having that barn raising that I've been joking about after all!