Down Time by Holly Ardent

Author:Holly Ardent [Ardent, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ardent
Published: 2016-05-10T21:00:00+00:00

When I woke in the morning, Molly and Rita were both already out of bed. I was sore as hell, in lots of different places, from all the sex the day before. I was also starving, hungry enough to eat a horse. When I got to the kitchen I found out that I was the last one up, other than Sandra, and that my breakfast was being kept warm for me. They'd let me sleep in, so maybe Molly really did believe me when I'd told her the two of them had worn me out a couple of nights back.

I filled a bowl of oatmeal from the pan on the stove and also noticed that there was enough left for seconds. I grabbed part of a loaf of bread, some honey, butter, and an apple. A large glass of water finished off the first serving of my meal. After I finished everything I'd taken I went back for a second bowl of oatmeal and some more water. For some reason I was feeling incredibly dehydrated.

After finishing breakfast I went outside and found Molly and Rita working on a raised bed garden plot we had in our Zone one (Zone one being a term in permaculture for the area closest to the house that you see all the time. Plants that need the most maintenance go there so you see them frequently and they get the extra care they need). They were pulling out plants that died in a recent light frost and adding the remains to the compost pile.

It was the right time of year to harvest the rose hips and that was my plan for the day. We'd seen just enough frost so far that the hips had turned red. The leaves on the rose bushes would start turning colors soon, which would make it harder to find the hips themselves on the plants.

I asked Rita and Molly if they wanted to help and they said yes, they'd join me when they were done pulling dead plants. I went inside and grabbed several containers to put the hips in. When I got back out I helped finish clearing out the dead plants in the raised beds. Then we turned some worm castings and compost into the soil in the areas the plants had come from.

As an aside: Compost and other soil additives were used a lot before the Crash, but they were normally purchased from stores. That was no longer an option now. We'd started a compost pile and a worm farm back when you could still purchase things easily, anticipating a need for these soil additives when they weren't commercially available anymore.

Mulch was another item needed for a highly productive garden in our area, but that was easily obtained from the bark that fell off our firewood and the leaves from our deciduous trees that dropped each fall.

Worm castings were our favorite additive. They're a very rich soil additive so you didn't need to use a lot of them except when preparing a new spot for planting.

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