One of my first stay-at-home and self-isolation projects, at the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early March, was to begin growing some vegetable plants from seed. It felt important to me, at the time, to do something that was both future-oriented and hopeful.
These little seedlings, while we still had snow on the ground, were a daily reminder that spring and summer were coming, and that things would (hopefully) soon get better here in Montreal.
The news back then was apocalyptic, in part because this city was Canada’s epicenter or the pandemic – as it remained through almost all of the spring and summer months. Those last few weeks of cold, damp, grey winter weather here in March are dismal at the best of times; the pandemic, I knew, would make them seem much worse.
As for the self-isolation portion of the pandemic, I was already experienced with semi-isolation due to my chronic pain condition and related mild cognitive impairment (MCI). I had to abandon my career, and my dream job, in December 2018 due to the MCI; at that point, I found myself suddenly spending my days mostly alone after working in an open-plan office environment with over two hundred colleagues.
It was a very difficult transition for me, and I still miss all of the multiple day-to-day interactions with my coworkers. But that personal experience of feeling isolated is why I knew how important it would be to have something to look forward to, to have a project that was hopeful and forward-looking during the pandemic near-lockdown period.
I learned early on in my medical leave to plan activities outside of my home, in addition to the regular intense exercise that’s an integral part of my overall pain management plan. I signed up for brief artistic, creative, and cultural activities offered by local community centres and libraries; usually an hour each, because that’s about the limit of my concentration or focus now.
Whenever possible I’d also plan to have coffee or lunch with friends, at least a couple of times each week. Sometimes that was as simple as bringing a take-out lunch for two to my husband at his office, and eating there – I know many of his colleagues, and folks would often stop by to chat with us both.
Time spent in nature is so important to my general well-being that some days I’d have to schedule a walk in the forest not far from my home. I was also doing some one-on-one patient support, helping other people deal with the impacts of chronic pain on their lives, so my days filled up relatively quickly.
Those feelings of isolation faded with my increased activity level, but on the days when my MCI is at its worst I still don’t leave home by myself. It’s a scary feeling, and not one I want to experience around anyone but my husband.
Of course once COVID-19 began making itself known, all of my organized activities were cancelled. Before my husband began working from home due to the pandemic in mid-March, I knew that I had to take steps to ensure that those feelings of isolation wouldn’t return.
That’s when I had the idea of growing vegetable plants from seed. If nothing else, I’d be able to talk to these little plants while my husband was at work! I bought two small seed-to-seedling planting beds, with removable greenhouse-style covers.
Each held 70 little pods for seedlings, and I knew full well that many of them wouldn’t survive until planting season. It was fun to see these little seeds growing for over six weeks. I’d check them first thing each morning – before I even made coffee!
The question soon became: “What are we going to do with all these veggie seedlings?!” We’d tried to grow veggies several times in the past, in our many garden areas, but the wild rabbits would munch each plant down to the ground and kill it.
This year, with plenty of time on my hands, I kicked around a multitude of ideas for how to keep the rabbits away from the vegetables… and decided to try a modular raised container garden. As a bonus, I snagged this locally-made container garden set on sale!
Unfortunately for my seedlings, our winter weather continued for longer than usual; we weren’t able to plant the seedlings into the container garden because there were still frost advisories until late May.
If I’d known how late our spring weather was going to be, I’d have transplanted the seedlings into small plastic yogurt pots (does anyone else save these, for no good reason?!)… But I didn’t, and many of the seedlings died off the week before we were finally able to set up the planters.
My next little dilemma was where to put our new container “garden”. After dragging it (empty!) around our front and back yards, it finally ended up at the bottom of the steps leading to our front door. This spot has full sun for the plants and is in a convenient location for me to water them with a kitchen watering can.
We soon realized that we could also check for ripe cherry tomatoes, from our living room window. There were more seedlings than space, even though so many of them had already died from being kept in the tiny pods for so long, so we planted 15 or 20 mini-pepper seedlings into several large flower pots that had been sitting in our garage for years.
These pots were scattered in among our flower beds, with the hope that their edges would be high enough above ground to discourage the wild bunnies. Well, the rabbits didn’t get to any of the vegetable plants.
This week I’m harvesting the last of the veggies, and we’ve decided to continue this adventure next year. This time, though, I’ll be ready to transplant the seedlings into those saved yogurt pots as soon as they start outgrowing their pods in the mini-greenhouses.
We had nowhere enough vegetables for our primarily plant-based diet, but it was fun – and very satisfying – to grow at least some of our own; beets, carrots, cherry tomatoes, lots of different lettuces, peas, sweet peppers, and several varieties of herbs. We ended up eating all of these freshly-picked vegetables raw, even the beets and peas. Delicious!
Because my rare disease, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), is both an autoimmune and a neuro-inflammatory condition, a few years ago I switched us to a mostly anti-inflammatory diet. We eat meat only a couple of times a week, fish much more often, and subsist mostly on plant-based foods.
It’s difficult to tell whether this has made a difference in my overall CRPS pain and symptom levels, but I have noticed that anytime I have takeaway or restaurant food I feel much worse – for hours or even days afterwards. I suppose that’s enough of a sign that my body prefers the more anti-inflammatory foods that are now the focus of our diet.
Today I harvested the very last of these home-grown veggies, and I have to admit that I was proud of my little experiment with the seedlings and container plants. Now I just have to find something to do with all the green cherry tomatoes; it’s getting cold at night now, and they won’t have time to ripen on the plants, so I picked them green.
Whatever it is that you do to feel better, whether in terms of what you eat or what you do, I hope that it’s helping these days. This virus will be with us for a while longer, before vaccination becomes possible, so this is a good time to think about what kinds of things you might want to try over the next few months.
As always, thanks so much for stopping by! Feel free to reach out to me over on Instagram or Twitter; I’ve had to disable the comments feature on the blog as it was too much for my MCI to deal with. Stay safe, and keep well!