zen and the art of orchard maintenace - Blaugust the fourth

06 Aug, 2025

At my feet: a heap of limbs. Not human, not yet. Just branches, snipped and scattered—a sacrificial mound that, should I glance away, may very well animate and rampage through downtown in a frenzied, chlorophyll-dripping spree.

This growing season has been... more.
More rain.
More branches.
More hacking, hewing, and horticultural penance.

And I blame myself. Because of course I do. Last season, I dared the gods. I whispered—no, declared aloud under a smug blue sky—that I finally understood the rhythm of the garden I’ve tended for eight years.

Nature answered with a peel of laughter that cracked the heavens. A deluge followed¹, one that didn’t rot everything outright, but coaxed the land into a riot of upward-spiraling green—a vertical jungle of intent and spite.

And here’s the real horror: I. Don’t. Mind.

My Mind Is a Gelatinous Goo What Flows

Before the orchard, I despised yard work.
Go outside? In August? With the sun licking your bones and Bees buzzing hymns of agony²? Absolutely not.

Yard work, for me, was punishment in the shape of a rake. A sentence handed down by the petty tyrants of domestic chaos. I wasn’t a bad kid. But I was proximate to badness. My brothers often escorted home by the local enforcers or trailed by acrid rumors. Their sins? Vandalism of the suburban variety.
Doorbell pranks gone nuclear.
Shingles weaponized.
Porta-potties turned into sacrificial pyres³.

When the reckoning came, it came indiscriminately. I'd leave a towel on the floor—boom, conscripted into leaf-raking servitude alongside arsonists. The sweat was punishment. The sting in my eyes was justice. And the weekends were long.

So Obviously I Bought an Orchard...

I suppose you could call it hubris. I call it character development.

The house called to us with its perfect temptations:

• A studio for making strange things.
• A yard with potential and ghosts.
• Mid-century bones.
• Close enough to town to flee if the trees rise up.

And yet: a five-year-neglected hellscape. Sickly trees. Invasive horrors.
Garlic mustard.
Poison ivy.
Stickseed.
The sort of botanical roll call that implies some pagan ritual went and cursed the lot.

I saw it and said, "Yeah, sure. Let’s plant apples."

My inner child, still haunted by the sprinkler-soggy ghosts of summers past, recoiled.
Go outside? In August?
Do you not know it is Still Hot? And the bees—they persist⁴?

Well, yes. Yes, they do.

Promises Kept

There was never a universe where two disabled people could manage this cursed Eden without help. And yet I made a pact—bloodless but binding—with my wife, the land, and that fragment of myself still flinching at sweat.

And then I got to work.

With hats.
With therapy.
With sheer, caffeinated spite.

I had two haunted relics from my childhood:

1. Sweat in my eyes felt like acid and doom.
2. I had no idea what I was doing and feared failure like it was a vengeful demigod.

There’s no tidy epiphany here, dear Reader-Eye. Just exposure therapy and SPF 50.
I wore hats to shield the sting and let go of shame when I inevitably butchered a tree. Failure became compost.

And if you're a gifted child raised by chaos navigators with GPS made of guilt?
You’ll understand.

Maybe we’ll unpack that in another post. Maybe I’ll plant that seed and let it grow.

Kintsugi Brain and Mowing the Lawn

Now, I find myself outside. When the AQI doesn’t scream “miasma!” When the sun isn’t conducting an orchestra of death rays. I snip. I mend. I hurl apples at Gordon the Groundhog ⁵, who mocks me with his perfect little hands.

It's peaceful. Ish.

I’m still a fall creature, make no mistake. I was born of crisp air and bone-deep nostalgia.
But I’ve ascended slightly beyond the goo-stage of my orchard evolution.

As the light fades and the season bends downward into the golden decay of autumn, a part of me begins to smile in the shade.

Soon, the sweat shall lessen.
Soon, the pruning shall stop⁶.

Important aside:
All puns were intended.

• 30 Aug, 2025 FIELD REPORT: STARDEW VALLEY - Blaugust the twenty-ninth

  in which our author explores the audacity of slowness

• 29 Aug, 2025 Phosphors within a dying bulb - Blaugust the twenty-eighth point five

  in which our author offers and ember of poetry

• 28 Aug, 2025 Just a photo of me with my cat - Blaugust the Twenty-seventh

  in which our author posts a picture of him with his cat.

Footnotes

#blaugust #garden #orchard