Verbascum (And A Bit More Mindfulness)

What can I say? Mum and I love them. We bought them at the garden centre earlier this week. Mum left today but before she did there were a few last gardening jobs to be done. Watching Mum and I garden is sometimes like watching the opening of an episode of Casualty. Today we climbed a stepladder with a pair secateurs to prune the trees. We also moved the compost bin. Composting is one of those things that I knew in theory, but wasn't sure I believed in until I was actually able to use my first bucket of compost on a rocky bit of my garden today. I am trying to get an alpine rockery growing, so it's a fine balance between having enough soil and not too much soil, and making sure it's a bit crap. It was this that I intended to blip. But then the sun shone on the Verbascum and they won hands down.

Today feels like the end of a crazy couple of months and it's time for normality to resume, but with a few changes. A friend of mine and I have been discussing The Exhaustion Funnel recently (yes, it's more mindfulness!), the idea that as you become stressed, you let go of the things that nourish you most because you view them as optional, and begin to mistakenly focus your energies on what you think is important, such as work, until you are 'spat out at the bottom, a shadow of your former self'. With this is mind, I have resolved to garden for at least 30 minutes a day and read for at least 15 minutes a day, because these are the things that REALLY important to me.