Spring Reset

We’re sharing a real-time update from our home life and using it to talk about what we care about most: peaceful living, joyful rhythms, and daily habits that help us step away from stress, even when we only have a small window of capacity.

We walk through what we’ve learned after a full year of backyard pool ownership, from winter freeze-protect settings to the reality of spring “pollen season” where everything looks dusted in yellow. Pool maintenance is not glamorous, but we’ve found an unexpected mental health win in it: skimming and cleaning can become a mindfulness practice. When we treat a necessary chore as contemplative time, we get a cleaner pool and a quieter mind, which is the kind of practical stress management that actually sticks.

Then we head into the garden for a spring growing season check-in: building out a robust herb garden with basil, parsley, chives, sage, lavender, lemon balm, and a whole experiment of mixed mint varieties. We talk raised bed gardening with dahlias, tomatoes, and cucumbers, getting our irrigation system running again, and watching fruit trees and berry bushes wake up while birds try to steal the harvest. We also share our excitement about a GreenStalk vertical planter and the learning curve that comes with trying something new.

If you’re craving a calmer pace and a few grounded ideas you can try today, press play. Subscribe for more slow living inspiration, share this with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a review telling us what spring habit brings you the most peace.

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com 

Transcript

Welcome And A Slower Pace

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to the Create Harmony Podcast. If you're looking for a place where you can step away from the stress and the noise and the chaos of your life, you have found that right here because we together as a community focus on peaceful and joyful living. We focus on our daily habits. We're very intentional. Our conversations are intentional about our daily habits and our rhythms. And being intentional helps us shift our focus on noticing the goodness that's around us every day and really giving thanks for that. And it also helps us slow down and savor the small moments of joy in our day. And I will also add, if you do have a life that is very, very stressful and you have a hard time imagining yourself slowing down, that's okay because you're gonna slow down just while you listen to this podcast. And if that's all that you do to make an adjustment today, that is a small step in the right direction. And maybe on another day or in a different season, you'll have more capacity to add more peaceful and joyful living into your life. This is episode 166, and I am your host, Sally Burlington, and we are going to give an update on how things are going around here. So you guys know that if you've listened for a while, that we have put a pool in our backyard. We did a massive pool construction project, and it was, you know, something to be endured while it was happening, but now we have a pool, and we had that. They put water in the pool last April. So we've rolled around. This episode is airing in April. We've rolled around back to one full year of having a pool. So we're really learning a lot about how to have a pool and what that's like. Um, we learned all about freeze protect mode in the winter because there were many, many cold days. We had some snow here, and so the pool, we do not, we live in a pretty warm-ish climate. So we don't cover our pool and close it down for the winter, or we did not last year. We keep it open because sometimes in our winter we have some temperate days, and it's nice to look out there and be able to sit out there by it. So it's open all year round, and it just is a matter of keeping it from freezing, which we have a setting for that. And then now we've come around into spring, and it has been so nice to think that, you know, we have some days. The way that our spring works here, I was saying um in an earlier episode is that we have days that are, you know, 85 degrees, 90 degrees, really, really warm. It feels like for sure you need a bathing suit and some flip-flops, and then the very next day it will be back to the 40s or even the 30s. So we we go back and forth a whole, whole lot in our spring, as well as we have a season here called pollen. We we call it pollen, P-O-L-L-E-N, and that is from the trees and the plants and the flowers. And when I say pollen, this part, this region has a higher than average amount of pollen because of the types of trees that grow here. And that means that everything, everything is covered in some white, dusty looking stuff. So it looks kind of dirty, like the all on your porch and on your driveway and on your car and on all of your porch furniture and on all the furniture around your pool and you know on your dog's feet when they come in from being outside in your yard or even just billowing through the air. Pollen is everywhere for a number of weeks, and there are people that really suffer with allergies. I'm fortunate that I don't have that as much, but it's a time when you maybe can't fling open the windows and let, you know, let the house air out. Because if you do, you're going to then have pollen all over everything on the inside of your house as well. So we've been learning about pollen in the pool. That's a process, and we've cleaned it out a whole whole lot. I am um, I've been trying to sort of shift that into a mindfulness exercise because it has to be done, you know, we have to clean out the pool almost every day during this season because there's just so many little bits and baubles of pollen everywhere. And so I just try to think this is my time to reflect and quiet my mind and just, you know, it's it is very contemplative. So I just I just do that, and it's very satisfying to see the pool all cleaned out when you've when you've scooped out millions of little pollen um leaves or worms or whatever I call them. They look like little worms when they're laying on the top of the pool. So that is what's happening around here a whole lot. There's also a lot of porch furniture to be cleaned and pool furniture to be cleaned. We're we've come to the end of pollen season, so we're working on getting all of that cleaned up, spiffed up again. So that's that's not quite as easy to convert into a mindfulness process, but you know, it's a means to an end. It has to be done. So that's happening around here, as well as we're planting a lot of plants since it's starting into the growing season. So we have the robust herb garden going. We've got parsley and chives and sage and let's see what else. Basil, a lot of basil, because we do eat a lot of basil around here. We have some um lavender and lemon balm. I bought several different types of mint. I bought, I just decided that I was gonna put all my mint in one pot because we had a pot of mint, but it did not survive from last year, which is unusual. But anyway, I'm gonna put it all together because mint is invasive. So I bought four different kinds of mint. I have a grapefruit mint, I have a chocolate mint, I have a pineapple mint, and then one other kind. I can't remember right now what it is, but anyway, I'm just gonna let that get all entangled with each other, which is what it's gonna do, and we'll see if we'll be able to identify. It's just a tiny bit of flavor that gives it that distinctness. So I don't know if we'll be able to tell which mint we're eating or using in the future, but that'll be a fun experience to check that out. I did also try some lemongrass this year, so I've never grown lemongrass before, so I'll be learning about how that goes. Maybe I'll make some delicious lemongrass-inspired dishes. I don't know. But anyway, just thought that was interesting. So we're growing that and lots of other herbs, getting the herb garden all up and running. And then we've got our raised bed garden going. We've got the dahlias planted, some tomatoes, some cucumbers, all sorts of other things. I'm still trying to decide whether I'm gonna try my hand at some wildflower seeds in one of the beds. Um I've not had a lot of luck growing things from seeds, so I'm not sure, but uh maybe I'll just toss them in there and see what happens. Don't know. But all that to say, we've got things up and running and growing. It took a while for us to get our irrigation. We have an irrigation system at our house that is run by run by a well. We live in the city, but we don't use city water for irrigating, so it takes a little time to get the well, you know, transitioned after winter. So we've got that going and we're watering things, and stuff is growing. And I will remind you that in our yard, I think I had shared this before, that we have a lot of fruit trees because the people that lived here before had bees. So those fruit trees are starting to leaf out and bloom. We've got cherry blossoms on our cherry tree. There are some tiny, tiny little apricots on our apricot tree. There are some tiny, tiny figs on our fig tree and stuff like that. There are some grape vines that are around in the side yard. Last year we had a lot of grapes that grew on them, but because they are uncovered, we basically just fed the birds and we did not get to eat any grapes. So I don't know, we might have to strategize to see what some possible solutions to that are. As well as blueberries. We have two blueberry bushes that we planted, and they have blueberries on them right now, but they are not ripe. And our experience last year was that they were stayed right there on that blueberry bush until the minute they were ripe, and then they were all gone in a half second by the birds. So again, we might have to put some animal barrier situations there in order to get any blueberries and in order to get a crop. The thing that I'm most excited about that we're doing in our garden is called a green stalk, which is a vertical planter. It's a new thing that we've put together and it has like five tiers with these little pockets that stick out. I've been putting some pictures on Instagram about it, and you just plant things in the little pockets, and then it has a self-watering thing down the center. So water goes into the top and it trickles all the way down to all the little plants and it spins around. It's just a cool neat thing. So we've been experimenting with that and what we can grow in that this year. I'll keep you posted on how that goes. There's gonna be some learning curve about that as well. So lots to be excited about around here. We are enjoying it, looking forward to another pool season. So just thought you might want to get an update on all of the things going on around here. And hopefully, you are enjoying all of the exciting things happening in your spring, and you'll come back next week for some more spring content. And until next time, peace.