I can’t seem to help myself. Maybe this happens to you. You go outside in the morning to water some special plants. You’ll only be out there for 10 minutes, 15 at the maximum. Then, two hours later, you get back in the house—sunburned maybe—but you’ve probably done it so many times your skin has already turned dark. Sunscreen? You’re only going to be outside 10 minutes and the sun hasn’t even cleared the neighbor’s treetops.

If that sounds at all familiar, you can probably picture my morning. Among the things I’m passionate about is prairie. I live in town now, not altogether willingly, but I grew up on a farm in mid-grass prairie.  So I’ve been gradually turning my large lot back into short-grass species.  I love that I don’t have to water except maybe once or twice a season—and mow not at all. That means I can allow wildflowers to grow . . .

See. That’s how I end up outside for hours rather than minutes. I distract myself.

Back to this morning, it proceeded like many others. I watered the new grass I planted last month. Buffalo and gramma grasses are doing well. Then I popped around to the other side of the shed to pick raspberries. There were some woody canes from last year’s crop growing in the “patch,” so I stepped inside the shed for my pruners and leather gloves to cut a few of them. Well, I kept cutting. When I’d finally cut all the canes and picked all the raspberries, I noticed I had some snow peas ready to pick. So I picked them.

That took me through the shed to the vegetable garden where I noticed I had some suckers growing on my pumpkin vines. I still had the pruners with me, so I cut them. And then, of course, I had to check the tomatoes. I have a calcium deficiency in my soil here and I remembered I hadn’t given the ‘maties their calcium nitrate, so I went back in the shed and got the calcium to spread. That reminded me I needed to spread some micro-nutrients to all the food plants. I went back in the shed and got the pellets to scatter.

I have a piece of roof gutter in the garden. It has holes drilled in it and end caps. Since I have an artesian well in the middle of my basement, I pump water for months. I’ve routed it to the garden where I run it into the gutter to control the flow onto my veggies. Well, I had to move the apparatus to a new location. Then the morning was pretty well gone.

Does this ever happen to you? Do you have a distraction story?