The Fine Art of Pottering Around

potter about/around:
"To spend time in a pleasant, relaxed way, often doing small jobs in your house."
— Cambridge Learner's Dictionary

Paid subscribers, it’s time for the June Garden Tasks PDF! Grab it at the link further down the newsletter to download. Lots to do all around, but also lots of wonderful goodies coming out of the garden right now. Enjoy!

It all started with the simple act of sitting outside to have a cup of coffee right here:

This patio off our dining room door is a lovely, secluded spot flanked by a couple humongous rhododendrons. Some plants that, since we moved in 2020, have remained untouched and slowly encroached roughly two feet into this sitting area. So since they had finished blooming, I consulted this piece from the American Rhododendron Society about methods/timing for pruning just to double check, and started methodically cutting away some of the offending branches to open the area back up. Typically I like to let our rhodies simply do their thing, but unfortunately these needed some snipping.

I wish I took a before and after, but alas I had my phone still plugged in upstairs (as part of my near constant efforts to reclaim my dang brain). But I put all the clippings on top of a rather large tarp to bring to the compost pile and it was a sizable mound of plant material. Now, I feel it important to clarify here that I didn’t actually bring them to the compost despite my good intentions, and my loving husband did that task for me the following day. The area feels so much better and open, and I even moved the chairs around a bit since the area above gets drenched from lack of gutters on that part of the house.

Then, buffered by some early success, I realized the chickens needed some water and food, so I set off on my merry way to do that. Except while out there, I noticed that one of the chicken waterers was still broken, despite my earlier attempts to fix it. So I lugged it over to the hose by the garage, disassembled it, cleaned every single piece, and put it back together again. Ugh, still broken! I threw up a quick Instagram story asking folks to weigh in on their chicken waterer solutions, and ended up getting some fabulous responses. But while out by the garage, I figured I would start on one of my action items from our weekly family meeting — clean out the garage.

An hour later, I had a pile of junk to bring to the recycling center, had unearthed a giant rainbow umbrella that I thought was broken, found our bluetooth speaker that we’ve been looking for for months, and brought all of my wooden tomato stakes out from storage.

“Well, I’ve got the tomato stakes, might as well quickly pop out and do that before we head out of town for a few days!”

Meanwhile, I had yet to have a single sip of coffee and it was currently languishing untouched by the sitting area next to the newly-pruned rhododendrons.

Oh, well! I could microwave it when I was finished with my tasks. So I set off to stake the tomatoes (nearly done, mental note to purchase some more because I’m 10 short) when what did I discover? A bunny has somehow either taken up residence or found a weakness in the garden fence. Another mental note: patch up the likely entrance.

While faffing about the garden checking on my plants, I noticed a male oriole chittering away, I think in his attempt to alert me, jelly lady, that I needed to hop to it and fill it back up. And alas, the oriole feeder was devoid of jelly —so I hustled back inside to grab some jelly and fill it up. I couldn’t possibly risk disappointing our resident flock of orioles and irreparably damaging my street cred with the local birds. What if they never come back!? My heart couldn’t handle that kind of guilt.

What had I been doing? Oh yeah, the garden, but that could wait. More pressing was cleaning the garage, because the only thing I love more than a checklist is the dopamine hit of being able to check items off a checklist.

So I moved some items up to the second floor, rearranged some other items, listed some more on Facebook Marketplace (the bane of my existence), ShopVac’d the entire garage, and started researching DIY plans for shelving to better organize the space.

Now, let the record show that while I have never been diagnosed with ADHD, I’ve had countless people in my life tell me that they know for certain I have it, including my husband. Because this video below is basically how every moment of every day feels for me, but I can’t tell if it’s actually ADHD or just general scatterbrained mental load from motherhood. Jury is still out!

When I finally came back inside —all of this happened in the margins of the morning when my husband was hanging with our kids before he had to hop online for work —I reheated my coffee, and brought 4 other mugs that I found scattered around the yard, garden, car, and garage. They’d been missing for a while, and I used my old “I put them somewhere for safekeeping” line which both my husband I know to mean “I left them somewhere while I got distracted doing something and they’ll eventually make their way back inside.” Because they always do!

Until next week, writing to-do lists in various notebooks, pieces of paper, and phone apps in a desperate attempt to get a handle on things,

Amy