Finishing: Finishing

Last Sunday, a group of gleaners (summoned by Himself) came to take the extra fruit from the plum tree, so that this year the driveway won't be littered with fruit leather. Finished.

This Friday I picked every ready-to-eat bean, snap pea, tomato, strawberry, pepper, zucchini, pattypan squash, and cucumber in the farm. Well, every one that I could find--I'm sure that I missed a few, but I searched every plant, so hopefully none of them should be shutting down due to over-mature food. Finished.

I washed the strawberries and fed half of them to Himself and me (woohoo!), and froze the other half sliced with sugar. Finished.

I gave away all the zucchini and pattypan squash and some of the cucumbers. Finished.

The rest is in the fridge in nice little baggies and boxes. Not eaten or processed yet, but we have a plan. Just getting them promptly chilled and stored is a Finished.

After concluding that there's decent evidence that my recent lush hand-watering of the strawberry beds resulted in a fresh crop, I watered them again. Finished.

I finally ordered that bottle brush that I've been meaning to get forever, and cleaned that nice vacuum bottle that I've been meaning to clean, and used the bottle. A little thing, but finished.

I'll be Without Car for a little while, so I bought enough compost and irrigation supplies to get me through the next few weeks of farm prep. Not finished yet, but a nice clean clear step.

So. Finishing. It's a thing.

Farming and finishing

I've been reading about task switching and multitasking and the Kanban Work In Progress concept and all that stuff.  And the Zeigarnik Effect, the human tendency to remember unfinished tasks and forget finished ones. And some website (I'll link to it if I find it again) was talking about the tendency of overloaded people to take on little tasks, just to have the pleasure of finishing them.

I've always tended to have a lot of unfinished projects. Right now I have five ideas for books, several sewing projects in work, a whole gang of planned series for this blog that I never did. And so on. And opportunities to finish things at my job are increasingly rare.

Suddenly that's too much. My tolerance for the unfinished, untidy, un-put-away, "un", seems to be exhausted. I don't know exactly what the last straw was.  But there it is. 

I seem to be aiming all that Zeigarnik overload at the farm. (Usual disclaimer: 60 by 70 foot vegetable garden. "Farm" is a nickname.) Forming a plan. Setting priorities. Planning tasks. Doing them. Done. Finished. They're not big tasks, but all the same, finishing tasks, knocking them off one by one, seem to satisfy some craving.

Even something simple like picking all the green beans and snap peas that are ready, checking every plant two or three times, instead of stopping when I'm bored and leaving the rest to mature and slow down the plant. Full basket. Empty plants. Finished.

Do I have a point here? I'm not sure. Maybe I'll find out in later posts.

Meanwhile, that is all.