It feels nice to clear out a big chunk of work that has been sitting around for a while. This is in "pics orbit didn't happen" territory, but I finally put the garden plants in the garden. Until Thursday most of the garden was on the deck. And the milkweed and other wildflowers? Most of those were on the deck as well. The plants that would nominally be the garden were not in the garden itself because the space didn't exist yet—it was part of the retaining wall construction.

Then Thursday I finished the wall, and backfilled it with dirt, then transplanted a variety of chilies there (serrano, habanero, Thai, ancho, guajillo), plus a few stray eggplants and cucumbers.

Also on Thursday I finished making a big trellis for the tomatoes and transplanted those (all six varieties), plus three big tripods for bitter melon and loofah. That area left a little bit of room for transplanting other thongs like more chilies (shishito, jalapeño, piccante calabrese), eggplant (purple shine and ?), and tomatillo.

And then today I transplanted several varieties of milkweed and wildflowers: spider milkweed, butterfly weed, whorled milkweed, showy goldenrod, and purple coneflower.

All of that cleared off the literal deck; all of that cleared off the metaphorical deck.

This is all a gray area between creation and maintenance. It should be creation, I think, but it took so long to get these things in the ground that doing so felt more like maintenance—like keeping things going instead of making something new

It doesn't matter where you score it—creation or maintenance, maintenance or creation. The most important feeling is that feeling of moving a massive pile of pent up work. It feels great.