Life Post Stroke--Feel Better, Get Tan, Get a Garden, Get Happy

It’s mid-March and I’ve almost finished setting my vegetable gardens for 2007. Gardening is a joy for me. It gets me outside in the sun, and satisfies a deep-seated need in me to create something tangible.

I spend between two and three hours a day in my two gardens, puttering around, setting plants, seeding rows, thinning seedlings and of course weeding. It’s great post stroke therapy since it helps to reestablish fine motor skills on my affected left side and involves moderate exercise, which according to my docs, is very goof for muscle toning.

I spent a  long time late last fall and early this winter bringing my garden soil back to life. Three years of constant growing, including raising two crops of potatoes had depleted most of the nutrients in my soil. As I set beefsteak tomato hybrids yesterday, I saw visible proof that my soil has come back. Fining big handfuls of earth from my planting holes, I was amazed at the number of big fat earth worms in each handful of dirt. There may be no greater proof of good garden soil than the presence of the common earthworm.  I carefully put each of the brown wigglers back in the soil, in the hopes that they casings will boost my garden’s nitrogen curve.

But back to gardening as stroke therapy. It’s a query that’s directed to my blog via Google two or three times a week during the summer and spring. I started gardening again in my second year post-stroke. The first year in the patch, I tried to do everything by hand, (breaking and fining the soil, adding compost, and eventually setting seedlings and weeding). It didn’t take long for some of my fine motor skills to return and every year a little more control of my left hand returns, although it’s still not good enough to write legibly.

My one accommodation to my handicap was to crawl over my garden bent over a gardening bench. I used that bench to steady myself, as I stood up and when I worked to mix compost or fertilizer into 4-foot by 4-foot sections of my garden. Initially, I limited my work in the garden to one-hour periods. But as I have gotten stronger I’ve lengthened my gardening sessions.

I’m  not from a master gardener, but I’ve come a long way in the four years I’ve been playing in the dirt. Proof of this is sitting in a colander in my sink. It’s filled with plump round red radishes, my first crop of the 2007 season.

I grow at least six varieties of tomatoes, two types of potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, peppers and melons. In the sunny days of spring and summer, I go through two tubes of sunscreen a month and I get a little stronger everyday.

The gophers keep me honest and the promise of fresh produce keeps me smiling. It’s how I mark my days, in retirement, on my little mountaintop in rural northern San Diego County—Jim Forbes on 03/14/2007.