I am glad you made it through the surgery okay. I hope you are feeling better and that you have a rapid and easy recovery!

Every year your garden posts make gardening look more and more fun and fulfilling. It inspires me to want to make a garden too.

Sadly where I currently live, and with my plans so uncertain as to how long and how often I'll even be around, and my mental condition seemingly stuck on "breakdown" until quite recently, it's just really not that practical for me to start one just yet, but I really want to. I was even thinking about starting some kind of indoor mini-garden, since I can't really mess with what's outside in this place, but even that seemed an impossible task only a few weeks ago, and now that I'm finally feeling a bit better, I suppose it is probably too late. It's just me here after all now, and whenever I will finally be able to disappear for a while, there'll be no one to look after anything.

I think it is really cool how you built up the beds, putting the cardboard on the bottom and mixing in the layers of things that will break down. It has a very naturalistic permaculture-ish vibe to it and that stuff really interests me (not that I really know the first thing about it... yet). I think it's cool how we can provoke and leverage environmental processes like that. I hope I can do cool garden stuff like that someday.

You made me cry a little when you wrote:

I thanked each plant on the way to the compost pile.

I am sure they appreciated your gratitude. I don't know if plants have feelings the same way humans do, but I like to imagine they are on some level able to perceive and experience comfort, peacefulness, and appreciation. I've read about how people talking to their plants has been reported to make them grow better. Some philosophers now even believe that all matter may have the building blocks for consciousness, and the manifestation of a single conscious entity is a matter of organisation and locality. That is to say... you are conscious because all the "consciousness-stuff" in the matter that makes up your brain is linked together. Of course, who knows how right they are? But I find it fascinating to imagine about these things.

Certainly you have a wonderful variety there of delicious foods to come. If I were you, I would be most excited about the strawberries and the rhubarb... mostly together... in a pie. Yum...