Desk cleaning

The only thing I had energy for yesterday was about fifteen minutes of weeding and a lightweight, sit down job - tackling the mountain of paper on my studio desk. So sorting,filing and noting was the order of the day.

Several hours were spent just sorting through all those little note scraps, receipts, saved articles, etc. etc. which just get thrown on the desk during a throwing/firing cycle, to be dealt with later. Well, I didn't get to it all after the last firing and it really piled up. By the time I came in to get dinner, I could actually see the glass top on the desk!

Among my note scraps we're reminders to tweak or just run some glazes through the software so that was my after dinner job. I brought a few glaze notebooks into the house and this morning I'll get recipes from saved articles numbered into a glaze notebook.

At some point I need to get in the garden to at least harvest the next batch of beans or whatever else is ready. I noticed that all my sweet potatoes vines are gone. Early on some critter got to some and now they're all gone, so I need to dig in and see if there's anything to harvest.

Years ago when visiting Michael Cardew's pottery, I found him cutting some lettuce for his lunch. He had a lovely, moderate sized, kitchen garden, and he said that he had to keep it small otherwise he wouldn't have time to make pots. Well,that's the situation I reached this year. Next year I think I'm going to plant some miniature fruit trees, raspberries and perennials in some of those vegetable terraces and mulch heavily; and I think my vegetable planting is going to be narrowed down to tomatoes, beans, kale, herbs and salad fixings.

The local farmers markets have a great selection of locally grown produce, so next season I'll rely more on them, than my own efforts. Then I can have a better balance of studio and garden time. My extensive flower beds alone take a great deal of time to maintain and adding all those veggie growing areas has made the garden all consuming this time of year. Time to change.