Wednesday 29 July 2009

more from the lawn (or what's left of it)

so, the post swine flu period. when i should be all recovered and the like. except i'm not. sparkling form on the bike last week but this week, post night shift, so not. the mystery hay fever that appeared post flu is much worse and i'm feeling just 'not right'. so much so i may even go to the comedy that is the gp. who will say something post viral, then i'll have to go back to work, take my own bloods and start from there.

anyway that could all get me down, esp as this afternoon it's actually sunny so i should really be on the bike but, as it is, i make a foray into the garden. which is blooming. i should take pictures and maybe later i shall. vegetables are growing out of the ground and we are eating them. it seems somehow magical.

i fiddle about with herbs and cold frames, replant some tomatoes. one side of the front of the house is full of trees, gages, bays and a lilac, so that i can sit down among them and the world recedes. our campaign to get bees in the garden has been so successful we're convinced there's a bumble bee nest in the fuchsia. the beans and peas are growing like they've a mind of their own.

shortly we (or rather the man i'm going to pay) is going to dig most of the rest fo the back garden up so we can plant even more fruit bushes and the likes. i can hardly wait. it turns out that the garden activity and its effect on the neighbours - not speaking to us, snidey comments, strife - is nothing new tho i'm hoping that amy's experience will be shared by us and people will engage at some point. we share plants with some other people down the road so we're hoping they'll be by soon so they can help us enthuse over our sweet pea hedge.

gardening enthusiasm was tempered somewhat by the news this week that the bbc is going to sell the blue peter garden and replace it with a virtual one. what a bag of arse. while they'll obviously have to be moving property to do away entirely with a garden constructed for children, particularly given the flabby state of the nation's offspring, and to replace it for yet another opportunity to flob in front of a computer seems particularly stupid. i am with brillat-savarin when he says le destinee de nations depend de la maniere dontelles se nourrissent. i suspect however that the health bit of all this will be overlooked by the daily mail types of this world and they'll demand it be preserved as part of the nation's heritage rather than just built elsewhere, bigger and better. I should take a picture of the kids garden down the road at the primary school and send it to the bbc tho i'd probably end up getting arrested.

the wee untalkative lassie next door is obviously interested in the garden. does she even realise she can eat these plants? has she ever eaten berries off the bush? i doubt it. her mother refused all the bulbs we offered her and when she was given sunflowers to take home from school sneaked out at night to chop them down with scissors because she 'couldn't be bothered'. shameful. our response? a wall of sunflowers

so i guess it's never just about sitting in the garden even when it is. i wish i had a normal job where i could actually see my mates and they could give me a hard time about the plant growing instead of drinking myself senseless and despite not speaking to them i sometimes find myself wishing my parents could visit but the likelihood of that is about as much of the likelihood of me being out on the bike today. and i miss the lolling when t's there and i can adopt a more supervisory role. but maybe that's the advantage of being post viral. i can sit in the sun in between the rain, try to finish proust but really think about bachelard again, listen to the leaves rustle, the bees, let my eyes droop and enter the land of reverie

10 comments:

Niamh B said...

Tis mad the way a few plucky DNA molecules and a bit of sun can turn dirt into deliciousness... would make you think anything's possible.

Marion McCready said...

your garden sounds lovely, I'm planning on having a herb garden one day when we move to a bigger house, right now I make do with my bay tree - there's something so nice about plucking a few leaves from it to chuck in a casserole

swiss said...

it is quite astonishing.

my garden's not that big, just we've stuffed a lot into it. if you've room for a bay tree you could grow a couple of other things in pots. thyme and rosemary will survive here as will lavender.
or now that wee man must be (coming on) three(?) you could grow some potatoes in a bucket and let him dig them out.

the kids at the school have potatoes, herbs, lettuce, barious flowers and a wormery, a thig we want but as yet don't have.

last year we started with herbs, carrots and potatoes in pots and, buoyed with how little effort it was, it all went form there

Marion McCready said...

yes, he'll be three in december. you may well just convince me, I've got a big enough garden it was the dogs that were always a problem - we had three but now we're down to just one. maybe next spring I'll start planting!

swiss said...

definitely should give it a go. we got one of those mini greenhouses and it's overwintered our herbs and is currently growing tomatoes. and courtesy of aldis we got a wee cheap cold frame which is full of courgettes

Rachel Fox said...

Now see, Swiss, you'd be a better Blue Peter presenter than any of these barely out-of-puberty types. I say we storm broadcasting house and put you in your rightful place!

Sorry. Am still reading very long book about French revolution.

x

swiss said...

i think if i was on blue peter someone would be storming broadcasting house! lol

which french revolution book areyou reading?

Rachel Fox said...

'A Place of Greater Safety' by Hilary Mantel. History books put me to sleep too often but this one (fiction/history) is grand. The main protagonists are all frighteningly reminiscent of big club promoters!
x

Roxana said...

while reading the post i wondered why this neighbourhood war seemed to be fought over ("not speaking to us, snidey comments, strife") - i simply imagined they were jealous your garden was more beautiful :-) because a German friend has recently told me about the terrible envy which plagues people in Germany when they look at the vegetables in the neighbour's garden and see them bigger - so they attempt to win the contest by pouring chemicals on top of the plants, to make them grow faster and more beautiful, so they end up using more chemicals than farms. how stupid can people get, i never cease to wonder. but coming back to the lawn - Amy's article was enlightening :-) - i have to say that i hate them and as an outsider of the lawn-culture i could never understand their purpose. i would love to see pictures of your wild garden, by the way. and hopefully you are feeling better by now?

ps. there were a lot of Scots coming to Bucharest for the Steaua-Motherwell football match - and i saw some nice ladies on tv saying they actually wanted to accompany their partners only to see a bit of the city, which was nice to hear :-)

swiss said...

i think these attitudes are present in various forms anywhere. here people just don't like it if you do something different, the mind set is - who do you think you are, do you think you're better than me?

a prime example of this is ian hamilton finlay's garden little sparta which caused all manner of stooshies (good scots word for conflict) in its day despite it being in the middle of nowhere and you have to drive half a mile up a road to get to it.
http://www.littlesparta.co.uk/

i'm a bit football ignorant these days but steaua playing motherwell! what happened to them! at least they won! lol