Reluctantly learned in 2020

[sonia]

In 2020 I learned to be even more self-contained than I was before.

• Buying food in bulk, including visiting the farmers market every 2-3 weeks instead of every week.
  
• Growing more food in the garden. Turns out that adding compost occasionally and watering every day helps a lot!
  
• Ordering non-food items online. New for 2020: being charged immediately, and then having delivery delays of weeks or months, but eventually everything arrives (so far).
  
• Seeing clients online instead of in person.
  
• Running dance groups online instead of in person.
  
• Sewing masks. I just found out about rotary cutters and cutting mats!
  
• Grabbing a mask every time I leave the house (or going back for it).
  
• Looking ahead and dodging into the street to avoid crossing paths with other pedestrians. Nodding to them if they dodge into the street first.
  
• Spending even more time alone and more or less keeping my emotional balance.

It feels like this year has been a culmination of all the skills I've gathered and the home I've made for myself, and at the same time it has been exactly what I was trying to get away from - feeling alone and disconnected. I'm grateful for the ways I have stayed connected with people, including here on DW. I'm very grateful for my warm fluffy affectionate cat. And I hope that someday I will have more of the in-person connections I always wanted.

What have you learned this year? What will be useful to you going forward?

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I hear you about the loneliness and satisfactions of self-sufficiency, and I am very impressed that you garden!

[sonia]

This is the year when I realized that I had learned a lot about what not to do from all the past years of gardening failures!

[minoanmiss]

How does your garden grow?

[sonia]

The main thing I realized is that a plant only makes (extra) food for me if it's really happy, so I better give it lots of what it likes. Before that I was trying to save water, and the plants do make it through, but they don't make food for me. It does sound dreadfully obvious in retrospect...

The thing I'm still working on is to give plants enough space and not crowd them together when they're babies and then be too tenderhearted to thin them out.

Do you garden at all?

(Admires all your art icons!)