Like a moose in search of muffins
There is a children’s book called “If You Give a Moose a Muffin” by Laura Numeroff1 that I read to my kids many years ago. It tells the tale of a young boy who finds a moose on his front porch asking for a muffin to eat. The boy obliges, and then the moose asks for some blackberry jam to go with it. After getting the jam, the moose wants more muffins and after they eat them all, he wants to make more. As they are preparing to go to the store to get muffin mix, the moose gets cold, borrows a sweater, which reminds him of sock puppets. They make sock puppets, mayhem ensues, and you see how it goes: one thing partially completed leads to another thing, and another, until they can hardly remember what they started out to do.
This is pretty much the story of most projects around our house; certainly anything that involves tools. Even if it is a task we have completed many times before, and assemble all the tools we need, we will still need one we can’t find don’t have. So off we go to the hardware store (fortunately only a couple blocks walk), and of course when we are there, there will be that other thing we had forgotten to pick up last time, so that comes home too so we can finish the other project. And maybe we’ll also bring home some treats from the deli, since they are just out of the oven.
I am thinking of this moose-muffin story currently because our garden has been a tale of one thing leading to another, to another and then of course another, until the whole place looks like a giant tablecloth was pulled out from under the ground, and everything came back down on it’s side or upside down entirely. We have huge piles of broken up concrete from the destruction of an old path, alternating with other piles of lovely rich brown soil that was removed during the construction of a new path.
The ground along the new path needs to be filled in with gravel that comes from another part of the garden. I am adamant that we not throw much—if anything—away, and so to put it all back together again, humpty-dumpty style, we have certain events that have to happen in order.
We need to order gabions to make use of the excessive rubble from our broken up concrete path. Aside: instead of being only a few inches deep, the concrete path was 6-8 inches deep and took a full day rather than an hour or two to break up; Pete says our path was sturdier than most roads here on the Island. The gabions will form the walls of our new vegetable beds. Once we have used the piles of excavated rubble to fill the walls of the gabions, and filled these new boxes with the piles of soil, we will have open flat surfaces again. And then we can start replanting!
We have a wonderful gardener helping us design, build and plant as we go and he has a similar ethos of reusing what we can on-site and not wasting anything. Plus, he shares plants among his various clients, so a few of our inappropriate plants have moved on to more beneficial locations, and we have inherited some lovely surplus plants from other gardens. It is the perfect microcosm of small community—or in our case—island living: being creative with sharing so we all make the best use of our collective resources already here.
Meantime, it is raining most days, or threatening to, and my will to shlep gravel from one part of the garden to another sometimes wavers, even though I am anxious to get to the more fun parts of creating the botanical canvas on top of our infrastructure. I’m looking forward to our wonderful plants sharing their floral scents, luscious fruits and gorgeous flowers in spring and summer, while multi-coloured coloured bark and variegated leaves will enchant us in the autumn and winter. Hopefully smaller birds, insects and worms will find this a nutritious garden ecosystem to visit.
That is what I tell myself and it is my incentive to put on the gloves and waterproof jacket and boots, go outside, bend over, fill the bucket, stand up straight and carry another load of gravel to it’s new home. My reward will come next summer when I can pick my own blackberries and raspberries and make muffins. Fingers crossed I’ll find a moose at my front door shortly thereafter!
Thanks again for reading this week! i’d love to hear if you ever get distracted along the way on one project and end up with several going at once. Or if your tools “go missing” from time to time. Do you have other children’s books that resonate with your life? Please share if you do!
Enjoy this transitional season and all the delights and unexpected showers it brings. Until next week!
xoxo Sabrina
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You can hear the story read aloud at this link:
I chuckled at the thought that every effort begets more effort! So true. I include that everything takes way more time than you ever think it will. I think both get worse as you get older because you care about doing it right. When you were a kid you just wanted to get it done!
We fell in love with the If You Give series with the very first book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985). Fascinating trivia: the illustrator, Felicia Bond, is the sister of a former neighbor and good friend in Austin.