Return of the Mojo

Spring has come to the hill and I have gotten my creative mojo back. I’ve missed it. Welcome home old friend.

I first really met my mojo at my home on Edmund Street in Raleigh. I rebuilt gardens and created new ones, put up rain barrels, envisioned a fence with a door that Nicholas built for me, built a round brick patio by myself, and so much more. And then I moved. It seemed I left my mojo in that garden.

And now I am creating again. Nicholas, Kristy, Max, and I built garden boxes when they came to visit last week. Ethan was ready to help, too, in his great-grandfather’s gloves. The boxes have hardware cloth on the bottom as a hopeful mole deterrent; and are modified hugelkultur beds filled with an organic lasagne of cardboard from my cross-country move, logs, brush, grass clippings, newspaper strips, compost, manure, and garden soil.

Nicholas dug fence post holes for my Aldermarsh-inspired deer fence and installed posts donated by my neighbor when he removed them from around his trees, which have gotten too big for the cages to protect them from the deer. The resident deer family has already been sniffing around my installation.

When it became clear my help really was going to return to North Carolina before the project was completed, I said, “But I can’t make the gate!”  “Yes, you can,” Nicholas said. And so I did. I’m proud of it, but sorry I didn’t think about getting a door like the one in my beloved Raleigh garden. I’m looking for a window to hang in the top.

The fence is a work in progress; I will get some things into the beds before it is complete. Netting will have to do for protection in the meantime. The fence is made from the water spouts my neighbor is trimming off his apple trees (and a few from our trees) nailed onto mostly purchased 1x3s with nails from the vast collection in my dad’s workshop drawers. The gate is made of lumber found in my barn loft, leftover from some project of my father’s.

Stay tuned for more from me and my mojo. You ain’t seen nothing yet.