I realized I spend so much time waiting until projects are finished before I show them.

But life isn’t lived in the finished version. Most of it happens right here…

…in the middle.

So I thought I’d start something new. Welcome to the first Work in Progress Wednesday.

I’m loving living on the finca. The beauty, the space, the weather, it’s all such a joy. But with any home ownership comes responsibility! And I’m trying to stay on top of what needs to be done so I don’t wake up one day and realize my place is crumbling around me.

As you may know from other videos I have closer neighbors now. I really like having them in the casita. We look out for each other and they are the sweetest people. They’ve put so much work into the casita’s garden and transformed it into a beautiful wonderland.

The Garden

Nature has its own plans

After the hailstorm I assessed the damages and harvested what was left of the tomatoes. Then I decided to take out all the damaged plants, and clear space. For what? I don’t know. 

I ripped out my zucchini plant after only one zucchini. The whole plant got deformed and rotted with mold. My neighbors’ mellon plant did the same. The differences in climate here are no joke, and there’s a lot to learn.

I planted thirteen trees this year, my first attempt at raising anything with roots that deep, and I’m learning the way anyone learns a thing they’ve never done, which is to say badly, and slowly, and with a lot of wondering what’s going on. The avocado was my first casualty. 

I don’t know if it got too much water in that spot, or if the roots were damaged. My neighbor offered to dig it out and try to nurse it back to health, but it never recovered.

The eight little cedars out in the field have some damage. Maybe shock from the transplant. They are browning a little here and there. But there is also new growth so I’m hopeful that they will survive. At this point I’m thinking I should have planted double here.

I love the ash trees. These two are doing well. And the apricot has some hail damage but it also has some new growth.

The lemons are still going strong.

And in the corner, where I wasn’t watching, where I didn’t plant anything, something grew anyway. Some volunteer, pushing up out of the ground for months without a name, without me paying it any real attention until This week it blossomed. 

the most beautiful thing in that whole half-torn-out, still-recovering garden. Someone long ago must have planted it. It blossomed in its own time, I wasn’t expecting anything.  It’s a beautiful surprise.

Gardening here has taught me that you don’t really control very much.

The birds have won the apple tree. 

I was waiting for the lovely apples to ripen and maybe make a pie. But the birds have their own opinion about the apples, and it is that the apples belong to them. I’m making a note for next year, to buy a net, and some kind of truce with the birds and the bees. 

The Asian pears, for now, are still green enough that the birds haven’t noticed. I give it a week or two.

I don’t consider myself any kind of artist…

But sometimes I feel inspired to make something. My beloved jacaranda tree is dropping hundreds of seed pods. small and dark and strange, hard enough to survive a fall from that height without breaking, so I thought I’d use their unusual shapes to make a mobile.

I have this hoop from a lampshade that didn’t make it on the long trip from Oregon so I’m going to use it for the base of the mobile and hang the seedpods from it.

I thought fishing line would be good because you can barely see it, to attach the pods to and hang them at varying lengths from the hoop. The fishing line is so fine, it turned out to be the only hard part of the project. It’s slippery and I used a little super glue to make sure the knots don’t come undone.

It’s hard to see what this will look like without hanging it, but I have to find some way to hang it so that it stays level. Still a work in progress. And I might decide to paint the little pods, I don’t know yet.

Between raising a son and thirty years in a job that moved fast and did not care one bit about my inner artist, creativity was not really on my schedule in the past. I admired people who could make things, from a distance. The way you admire an astronaut walking out into space.

It’s been two years since I left that job, and now, apparently, out of nowhere, I have Ideas. Small ones. I didn’t ask for them, and I have no training, and yet here I am gluing seed pods to fishing line like it’s a normal Tuesday.

I’m not calling myself an artist, let’s be very clear about that. If this mobile turns out looking like a five year old made it during a sugar high, I will not be surprised. But I guess that’s not really the point.

My lovely neighbors took it upon themselves to design and make a nice property address sign. I like the way it’s hanging off the fence, very stylish.

So I thought I might make an address marker too. Hector completed the new access to the water catchment system with this nice slab of concrete with an openable door. And the old concrete slab is just sitting here. 

I thought I might sand it down a little and paint some kind of address marker for just outside the gate. This is just the thinking stage so far. I’ll have to buy some exterior paint and brushes, and come up with a plan.

So I may have said that Hector, my builder, had to go back to his main job for a while. Meanwhile the fence and the greenhouse are waiting in mid-project. 

But I’m very happy with what he has done so far. 

For the greenhouse he made this nice sturdy brick wall to contain the interior planter bed. If you recall, the pressure of the dirt and water was pushing out the flimsy plastic sheeting that was there, so this is a good improvement. The greenhouse is not in good shape and is now just supported by some planks of wood, and the corrugated plastic roof is barely hanging on. So when Hector comes back I’d like to make it a more sturdy structure and get new materials. I like having a little covered space here.

There’s not much to say about the fence. He did a great job with about half of it so far. 

There are lots of projects for the future, big and small. Like maybe a new doorbell system.

Well, that’s about where things stand around here. Some things are doing beautifully, some things are decidedly not, and most things are somewhere in between. I’ll keep you posted on the avocado. And the cedars. And whatever else decides to live or die before the next Work in Progress Wednesday.