So at midnight I found myself still clumsily rolling out chicken wire off the reel to staple it to hardened (really hardened) pine poles around already established tomatoes and peas in the flickering light of the security spotties.
How exciting to see my 'random peas' turning into plump greenfeast and stunning purple podded dutch.
I thought the seedlings were my favourite part of the gardening process...but now it's this part...and the next part.
I'm loving my mushrooms.
I spent 2 days soaking the logs and worrying that my garden shed (MyMan put his foot down and refused to let me use the bathroom for my fungi project) and now just three days after I first saw the lumps and bumps and tentacles of fungi erupting from the wood, I have a dinner plateful of Asian and European mushrooms.
The swiss and white button boxes are filled with tiny little helmet pin-points poking through the compost too, so I'm looking forward to that first flush (although they may be coming home with my to sit under my leaky bathroom sink this week).
Last night was the first night I felt like I was starting to see the rewards of my garden.
I pulled up spring onions and chopped fresh basil into my cheese-covered croissant 'bruscetta' mix.
After just three days since sprouting I have a plate full of Asian and European mushrooms - the boxed ones are only just poking their little helmets through the compost but the logs are prickling all over which is very exciting.
I'm fascinated by the purple podded dutch peas and the greenfeasts are just swelling on the vines.
My 'big bed' has survived the hot winds so I better think quickly what I'm going to do to raise those plants vertically.
...so much to do, so much excitement!
The ‘random peas’ are poking their heads up from their egg-carton beds. Another fortnight or so and I’ll plant them out against MyMan’s newly-painted frontyard fence (made of repurposed roofing iron) before planting another succession set.
The challenge is to see how long I can keep them going before the heat hits. They obviously reseed easily if my window boxes are anything to go by and I guess they’re good green manure if nothing else.
According to my Diggers guide, I can start planting beans in the next month, so that’ll be the next challenge. I might even intersperse beans and peas just to hedge my bets…and hedge my beds.
My dog is a Houdini.
The mad, parti-eyed Husky can escape anything, and has, until finally my home began to look like Stalag 19 with six feet of double-layered mesh reaching above the colourbond fences and another three feet of chicken wire dug in or zip-tied around the lower edges of the yard and building.
We named him Sid Vicious – because he was dark, demented and destructive. We even taught him to pull sandboards up and down the dunes, although we couldn’t teach him to come back when he was called.
Now he’s a little older, a little less erratic, but still we’ve lost six chooks to him and a neighbor-cat’s tail so I dread taking him out to the block, which is surrounded by sheep.
There was a time when we couldn’t walk him past the neighborhood horses without him almost pulling the kids through the fence like cheese through a grater. In fact, we used to joke that he thought they were caribou and was just reverting to his roots.
It’s not so funny now that there’s only thin electric fences between us and 1000 head of sheep, valued at $80+ each. If he ever got out we’d have to have his dead doggy carcass and a wad of cash waiting to assuage the current owner before he even discovered the losses. There’s no second chances for sheep-killers around here.
Before Sid, I had a Dingo-Coolie cross we called Sabre (why, I don’t know, except the kids insist all our animals have ‘s’ names) who grew up with TheBoy, the way Sid is now a mascot for TheToddler.
In fact, TheToddler enjoyed chasing Sid up and down the trench Daddy was busy digging today (to lay the chickenwire, to stop the dog getting under the fence that Jack built) and throwing clods of dirt at his shaggy companion if he looked like winning the race.
When Sabre died, age 16, of stomach cancer, I was easily talked into a puppy for ‘the kids’ sake’. Especially when the breeder convinced me that Sid, with his crazy eyes, would never be able to be shown and might even have to be put down (soft, so soft!).
That won’t happen again. When one day Sid passes (or commits suicide by sheep) I’m going to enjoy a dog food/bone/biscuit-free budget and going away for weekends without guilt.
In the meantime, we’re going to need a giant dog run, a tracer line and a whole lot of luck before we move Houdini out to sheep-central.
It’s strange being torn between two homes. In my experience you often don’t get all the jobs done at a house until you’re trying to sell it or leave…but now with MyMan’s handyman skills and slightly OCD time management it seems that both houses are quickly becoming something I can really love, or more importantly, both gardens.
He tells me not to worry, that renters will love a vegie garden. But what if I don’t want to hand mine over to an un-invested tenant?
At the same time, I don’t want to waste any more…well, time.
With six more months or so here, before TheGirl leaves for school and the rest of us move out to the block, well that’s enough time to grow watermelons, cucumbers, tomatos and beans, even plant a half dozen more passionfruit on the dog-proof fence…which I’m sure the renters will love, after all.
It’s very hard to restrain myself from buying an orchard-load of fruit trees and lumping them out at the block.
If you could only hear what I tell MyMan you’d think I was the restrained one. I say ‘let’s not overinvest before the sale goes through’, ‘there’s no use planting trees before we get stuck into the soil and put in watering systems’, ‘we don’t want to plant something now that we’ll have to rip out later on’...
But if you could hear the voice in my head, it’s squealing ‘look! look! heritage apples for sale – you’ll need at least SIX pollinators!’ and ‘red grapefruit, surely we’d learn to love grapefruit if it was red!’ and ‘well surely just a few olives and then we can cold-press our own oil, I’m sure they can’t be THAT big a weed problem’.
And then I stamp down hard on those urges and redirect them by drawing another orchard design on my big scrap pad and coloured textas. It’s not OCD (well, not much) it’s a communication tool – because if I show MyMan enough times, I’ll show up the block one day and there’ll be a loader, reels of soaker hose, a trailer of dirt and bundles of fencing wire all just waiting for a willing forewoman to point out where they should be.
One of MyMan’s few stipulations is that the chicken coop his father built more than 35 years ago has to stay. I inspected it the other night and, I tell you what, the FatherInLaw built to last. That thing is fox proof, storm proof, has escaped the termites and doesn’t seem to rust even.
So the coop will be situated in the orchard run. FatherInLaw – who spent the last 10 years running his own successful orchard in the Riverland – tells me that he and other citrus growers run melons and pumpkins between their trees. This got me reading about food forests.
So, ideally, my cucumbers, pumpkins, melons, zucchinis and other cucurbitae will be planted in trenches between the trees. I mentioned pegging chicken wire down in a tunnel over them while they’re young to keep the chooks away and MyMan promised frames…I’m not sure he and I are working on the same scale right now lol.
Then I could plant woody herbs like sage and basil, nasturtiums, maybe even mints in the shady places to attract pollinators, using the shade of the trees to protect them a little from the harsh sea winds and hot summers. I need to research a little more what will grow under the trees. I wonder how strawberries would do. I intend to grow grapes, kiwi, passionfruit and cane berries on the fence that will separate the orchard from the natural scrubline and keep out the GreatMadHusky.
I’d like to experiment with running a shallow water trench (perhaps using concrete, plastic sheeting or poly-pipe) through the trees and give ducks a go – but that’s a conversation for about 10 years from now. Apparently the duck nutrients are great for the trees, and the water could be diverted onto the trees with soaker hose or perhaps just holes in the trench. The usual watering regime would help fill the trench, we could divert catchment off the sheds and chook pen, and the ducks would keep down my pests.
The orchard will incorporate the ancient basketball slab and ring (the Orange Court) in its very middle – I can imagine future teens escaping the adults in that shady, tree-proofed little rectangle. It will run right up against the garden, which will be built in the remains of the old sheepyards FatherInLaw also built. I love the old timbers and the shape of the original sheep run.
The sheepyards back up against the new machinery shed which will protect from the winds and yet radiate heat over the garden. I’ll grow more vines over that shed eventually – maybe even some wisteria. I’m a bit of a sucker for those weepy blossoms like wisteria, crepe myrtle and I wonder if lilac or clematis grows here? Strictly to attract pollinators, I promise.
But right now we should really concentrate on the original house and yard…and frankly, there’s no use investing much in the house. It’s not one of those historic, stone-walled, timber-floored farmhouses that I yearn for and others hate…it’s an asbestos-filled, termite-ridden Shouse. But once upon a time it was well-loved, you can tell that because, outside the kitchen window, which stretches the width of the house, someone has planted a fig, a mulberry and an almond tree. MyMan is already busy giving himself a crick in the neck, chainsawing dead lichen-covered branches back to see if he can revitalize them before spring hits.
And in the meantime I can at least dream about nut trees, red pears, green apples and golden citrus…until MyMan gets the hint and breaks out the loader at least.
I spent my Sunday at the block. No appointments, no big plans, no big kids and simply gorgeous weather.
I had the loveliest day.
I dragged one of the comfugly chairs under a tree within gossiping distance of MyMan who was dedicating his day to fencing (again) and had given TheToddler his own toolkit so he could join in the working bee.
Spud Towers now has 12 apartments and the sweet potatoes have been evicted out of the towers and relocated against the fence because my lazy day of YouTube research revealed that you mustn’t cover over sweet potatoes like spuds – so there goes that plan. The other slips were dug into the rose garden. The towers garden gets some wind and sun protection, the roses don’t. The towers slips are mounded up, the rose ones are not. So it’s a bit of an experiment to see which will work out best.
The roses are taking a bit of a beating at the moment but there’s small hints – buds, fresh leaves, firmer posture – that they just might make it through.
The herbs, on the other hand, look marvelous: the caraway thyme, which was a pitiful tangle of twigs when it arrived, is now bursting through the peastraw in little green starbursts; the cardamom is pushing up new lime-coloured runners; and the purple sage is looking sturdy; although the neighbour’s cat has taken to sleeping on the catmint.
The spuds are here! The spuds are here!
And because I couldn’t wait until I could bludge an empty egg carton they are sitting and ‘chitting’ on my kitchen table in TheToddler’s matchbox car case. (My eggs are still sitting in Tupperware in the fridge because the last batch of cartons are currently nestling snow pea shoots.)
I’ve got my first trial ‘spud towers’ on the go at EastWinds and will build another half dozen this Sunday, seated in the garden in my ‘reclaimed recliner’ (a street curb rescue pair that are now permanently situated between the wool bales, the Bondwood and the cement mixer firepot for working weekends) with a pair of (new!) pink tin snips. That alone should speed the job up, which I’m grateful for, because it was excruciating last week using the side-blades of an old pair of pliers. I think I’m still suffering from the RSI.
I’ve got two varieties of sweet potato on the go – an orange and a purple variety – and both the local Mitre10 staff and my South African (SAFA) friends insist I can simply treat them the same as potatoes, although the books insist their a completely different tuber.
But, the whole point of this blog…the spuds are here!
I’m a little disappointed that I don’t have my coloured flesh spuds (I think I ordered the wrong set) but I have the very cool Pink Firs – which are long and nobbly, the dark-skinned Royal Blue and red-skinned Mozarts.
However, after MyMan got stuck into the half-fenced garden at my town house this afternoon after cooking for four hours at the kids’ sport, I can see that it wouldn’t hurt to make another internet order and fill both gardens with spuds. Everyone loves potatoes, right?
Right!
I know he was just diverting me…but it worked. I’m ridiculously tickled by my new pink-handled tools in their snazzy doctor-style bag. I’ve already cracked the box open to slice into several brown-paper-packages of seeds and spuds with my pink stanley knife and christened the girly-weighted hammer on the dog fence.
I've been pushing so hard for more work at the local school, beyond my two-days-a-week contract but; together with a week's work in the Science department, a specialist visit for the little rock-thrower and all the time we've spent out at the block; my lounge is slowly disappearing under a mountain of bookwork, clean washing (because I can manage to get the dirty stuff into the machine and out again, I just haven't translocated it to the drawers) and dirty socks (because the kids' process ends at 'remove clothes' and ignores the laundry, machine, washing, drying stages).
And, while I know it's time to spend some quality house work time in town, I'm already wishing I was back out at EastWinds with its dingy almost-outside-dunny and off-kilter doors and wavy floorboards.
I'm a little strange I think.
The ship skeleton that overshadowed MyMan’s house is gone now.
It pains me, because I loved the idea of saying to people “head inland 3km and turn left at the ship”.
The previous tenant of the Shouse was a fish farmer and had grand plans to rebuild the behemoth which ended up rusting quietly for almost seven years.
Now it is nothing but 10tonnes of twisted metal and a cheque.
How very Ozymandius it all is.
My son tried to kill me yesterday.
The little one, not the teenager (which surprises me).
We were finally putting in MyMan’s rose garden at EastWinds. I’d insisted that if, if they were going to have a chance of surviving, we needed to take advantage of the coming rains.
The boys had been collecting rocks out of the paddock we call the ReunionOval – this is where we will eventually build our house and it is named the ReunionOval because MyMan and I’s relationship is something of a reunion after 25 years living in different states, and because the paddock is going to be the family football oval until we build (we’re even putting in white poly-pipe posts before TheBoy’s 13th birthday party).
So the boys had been collecting rocks to make it safer for their sister to mow the oval and they had been creating a border for the rose garden.
Meanwhile I was elbow-deep in a muddy hole planting the ‘Blue Moon’ rose when I felt TheToddler looming over me with a small boulder.
The words ‘move away from me with that rock, the last thing I want is a boulder in the head’ had barely left my lips when I felt a clunk against the front of my skull that made my stomach roil and knocked me off my knees.
I could hear MyMan telling The(Evil)Todder off and requiring him to apologise as, sobbing, I lifted my head from the mud.
All I can think is it must have looked like a horror movie, the rain commingling the streaks of blood and mud and sending them washing down my face in rivulets. Blood dripping onto my hands and the still-bare roots of the rose.
Together, the pair of them let out a shocked ‘oooh’ – horror movie style.
Today, I am teaching agriculture (for the first time) to Year 10s who are truly tickled by my black eye and lumpy forehead (one of them even has a matching shiner from a sheep-handling incident). TheToddler’s ears are still ringing from the berating he received. MyMan’s new St John’s First Aid Kit got its first try-out and the ‘Blue Moon’ received a little extra blood and bone in its planting diet.
MyDad and MyMan share the very practical ‘why water it if you can’t eat it’ mentality. I remember as a child that my father cut a rectangle out of our clover-filled backyard to fill it with vegies, until the next time he was called away on a minesite job and the tropical rains came, turning the garden into our own personal slip’n’slide.
But we were surrounded by retired farmers and Italian families who knew the obsession of a well-loved garden. Uncle Cec next door had a fence full of tomatoes which, if they escaped to our side of the chicken wire, were doomed to end messily. We’d sit in the shade wiggling our fingers into the wire holes to pluck pear-shaped yellow and red tomatoes.
I grew up thinking I love tomatoes and then being disappointed at the taste of the supermarket fruit I bought for my salads and bruscetta. It wasn’t until I grew a poor neglected tomato in a pot which – in the heat and dry of my desert town – only created a single fruit. And that fruit, which I picked without thought on my way into the house after work, briefcase in the other hand, was red gold! The best thing I’d ever tasted. I WILL grow tomatoes like that again one day, just like Uncle Cec.
Across the road, Aunty Amy’s husband had developed agoraphobia after his years in the war and his picket fence marked the boundary of his world. As a result, it was a haven of cottage-garden varieties I’d never seen before in the tropical wilds of Mullumbimby: snapdragons, poppies and the entrancing pink snowflakes of crepe myrtle.
Our own yard sheltered a chook shed between a spreading mango tree and a sprawling choko vine. At night we’d listen to the fruit bats’ wings as they whop-whop-whopped down in amongst the sun-warmed fruit.
MyDad ran pubs for a big part of a childhood, including our local MiddlePub (every Aussie town has one) so he was on good terms with most of the community’s farmers including a household of retired brothers who lived two houses down from us and ran a market-garden-sized veggie patch around the edges of an enormous Mulberry Bush. Uncle Algie and his brothers never had children of their own and seemed to love the parade of pre-adolescent mulberry-pickers and silkworm-collectors that roosted in their tree every Summer. I would sprawl out on those giant branches, dreaming of the Faraway Tree’s inhabitants and home-baked turnovers.
I loved how those houses were built on sprawling half-acre blocks when I was a child. Now, despite the fact that most of those Mullumbimby blocks now house two buildings instead of one, today I live in the same kind of pastoral town with big yards and fruit trees and front-yard-gardens that are grown from cuttings that retire to ‘town’ off generational farms.
It was easy to grow almost anything in NSW. I remember cracking macadamias with a hammer in dimpled concrete, not realizing it was a ploy to keep us kids busy while the grownups enjoyed their BBQ and a few beers.
And I remember being dragged, sulkily (because almost everything I did at age 11 and 12 was done sulkily), along to a visit with one of MyDad’s work friends on the block they were still establishing and the friend’s wife took me for a walk through the beginnings of her herb garden where she took the time to show me how to crush the herbs between my fingers and breathe in their scent. I’ve been in love with lemon thyme ever since. Throughout my life, no matter if I had pots or a front yard or a sprawling farm garden, I’ve always had a lemon thyme.
Now my family has their own requirements for a garden. TheBoy wants chilies, lots and lots of chilies. So he can spice up our dinner menu. He’s also a fan of stonefruits. While MyMan and his daughter demand mandarins. TheGirl wants cucumbers and an apricot tree, so she can continue the summer holiday tradition of pulling the trampoline under its branches and talking and reading and eating fruit straight from the tree all day and into the hot, still evenings.
MyMan and I are in a power battle at the moment over whether or not to keep the LazyBeeChair – the reclining chair we found at the block, whose hollows are filled with a buzzing mass of bees and honey.
He has no interest in bees or the potential for stings and yet I’ve always dreamed of my own hive, ever since our aging neighbor Uncle Cec used to let me lay down on the concrete under the honey-press in his shed and he’d press the honey right into my open mouth. Apparently I’d go home with my foot-long locks stuck out like Pippi Longstocking.
So my compromise is to smoke up the LazyBeeChair, drugging its residents so I can haul it into my garden where – I keep assuring MyMan – its busy little pollinators will ensure the success of the orchard and our vegies. I will even have the help of a local apiarist, smoker in hand.
In the meantime, I just have to make sure neither the current owner, the scrapmetal guy or MyMan take it into their heads to ‘deal with’ our little insect ‘problem’. Do you think it is counter to my long-term purpose for me to keep mentioning anaphylactic shock?
MyMan tells a lot of stories about growing up on a farm. He has no doubt that if his family had stayed on the land he would have been the one to take on the property, and buying EastWinds now is probably his way of reclaiming his roots.
One of my favourite stories is about him raising his own pigs so he could buy a motorbike and then sulking to his father that the bike he wanted had already been sold - only to find it on the back of the farm ute when he was sent out to do the morning chores.
When I collected together the pile of random mixed pea and lettuce seeds that had escaped their envelopes to pool at the bottom of my seed file, he got very excited at the idea of planting out those ‘random peas’.
Apparently his brother (now a doctor of history) had an entrepreneurial streak as well and, after finding an ice-cream bucket of peas in the shed that had been earmarked as green manure for the farm decided he’d like his own pea farm. A giant square of sod was cut up in the middle of the house yard and hundreds of peas soon became a wild bramble of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ proportions.
I must admit some of my favourite memories of the Flinders farm were of TheBoy as a toddler, sitting beneath my snow pea frame plucking the pods and eating them warm from the vine, his face in shade but his little feet poking out into the sunlight.
In memory of both those special moments, the ‘random peas’ have now been planted out into egg cartons for relocation to the block. Looking through the packets, we have a possible lucky dip of: dwarf & climbing sugar snaps & snow peas, purple-podded dutch, golden-podded and greenfeast.
In my (limited) experience the purple and golden need a little more loving than the others but it’ll be a real rainbow feast if I get a whole heap of young ones to eat in the pods!
Small Beginnings
I didn’t think I’d ordered that much online but now it seems like EastWinds will be getting a good start on the kitchen garden this weekend. For the first time, Saturday sport is just down the road from the block and I’m looking forward to getting time with both my kids and my friends on the sidelines, and still being able to squeeze in some digging and dreaming.
In the meantime, my window boxes are being overtaken by snails for the first time. In my past life earwigs were my nemesis, but here it seems that snails are going to be the ones to mow down my lettuce seedlings and self-seeding peas.
So, despite all my plans to be ‘mostly’ organic I was so incensed by the sight of my leafless peas that I invested in snailbait, coupled with morning and midnight visits into the garden to crush any slimy invaders. Oooh, I find the crunch of their shells chilling. One day I’ll raise ducks and that’ll be one less job I have to do myself.
My windowboxes are seated on a white-painted north-facing colourbond fence and represent the only garden I currently have at my little town house despite equally empty chicken coop and tractor tires out the back, waiting for attention and occupants alike.
The plastic-lined willow-weave baskets were an impulse buy (they were on special!) and MyMan hitched up a reliable watering system for me after the first neglected lettuces began to wilt. Next thing we knew, with the addition of fish emulsion and regular water TheToddler and his babysitting buddy were expecting a strawberry or snowpea every time the car door opened alongside the garden. Basil and an ongoing supply of yellow and red cherry tomatoes made for lovely home-made bruscetta, although the capsicum succumbed in the last days to a hot wind and caterpillars.
So a few weeks ago I took my little safety scissors (I really must invest in some grown-up gardening tools) and hacked back the basil bushes, gloated over the sturdy lemon thyme, and tidied up the strawberries.
Now, the boxes have been replanted with lettuce, coriander, tricolor sage and pansies – only for me to discover that the capsicum, tomatoes, peas and lettuce have all self-seeded. As the weather warms up I often spend my mornings worrying whether I’m pulling out a fledgling ‘red leprechaun’ or nurturing a dandelion.
Noticing that the weeds beneath the boxes, on the driveway’s edge were benefiting parasitically from the extra water and my CharlieCarp regimen, I dragged out the terracotta pot collection and placed them strategically to catch the overflow and associated nutrients.
I’ve planted them with a self-seeded curly-leafed parsley plant that was languishing beneath the strawberry runners, sage, Vietnamese mint, garlic, spring onions and Vietnamese mint. I’m worried that the bulbs are a bit crowded but it’s a start.
I also ‘rescued’ some 5-colour silverbeet and mixed beetroots from the $1 basket at the local Mitre10 nursery which I don’t have high hopes for in the pots, no matter how deep they are.
One bunch of beetroot has become waterlogged in an old metal tin that journeyed here from the original farm garden and I’m waiting for MyMan to return my tool kit so I can punch holes in the bottom of the tin. That’s one downside I didn’t expect from having a partner again – he’s commandeered the many tools I’ve slowly collected together for myself over the past six or seven years. I really should have invested in one of those pink-handled tool sets. Perhaps now is a good time to start hinting to the kids that that’s what I’d like for Christmas. I spotted a pink shovel at the Mitre10 that would be handy this weekend when we start the kitchen garden – and I’d never lose it in the overgrown grass would I?
I console myself (and MyMan) that every pot or basket I plant here will be the beginnings of a garden out at EastWinds.
I admit it, I'm a hoarder, it's a sickness.
But I'm not your typical rubber-band-balls and other-people's-photographs kind of hoarders. I hoard seeds...hundreds and hundreds of seeds that are slowly losing their viability, tucked into small cardboard boxes and catalogued by alphabetical order and preferred sowing date.
Parsnips? When am I ever going to have the time, soil or climate for parsnips?
And just how many colours of tomato do I need? Let's face it, I've only ever managed to grow cherry tomatos until now. The rest die an early death at the hand of my nor-westerly wins and casual watering routine.
But it doesn't matter, I love them all...the shapes, the colours, the varying sizes and (often unfulfilled) promise of potential bounty.
In fact, after all these years of shaking that box of seeds around from house to house I now have an envelope labelled 'random peas and maybe lettuce or coriander'.
THAT's the envelope I'm planting out this weekend...before the next order of seeds arrives in the mail from Diggers ;)
I’ve been the voice of caution throughout this whole process. Don’t get ahead of ourselves, don’t want too much, don’t rush into something we can’t afford. But I’m starting to get excited now.
The subdivision is already in the process. MyMan moves in to the old farmhouse this week, which frees me up to start cleaning out my current home and life in preparation for moving in together at the end of the year…maybe, hopefully.
So, to celebrate this first milestone, I bought him some rosebushes for the property.
Now there’s a story here. MyMan and I are both fans of the ‘if you can’t eat it, why water it’ philosophy of gardening. But, in particular, I think roses are way too much work for too little reward; three months of flowers, 12 months of thorns and invader roots and escaping suckers. But my one-day Mother-in-Law loves her roses so, as a tribute to the family past of EastWinds, we’ll plant a rose garden at the property’s entrance where a tap has been handily situated for our use.
I did my research, chatting to members of our regional rose club for hardy varieties to suit, and presented MyMan with an armful of thorny bare-rooted branches which have since burst into leaf as they waited in water in my sunny little kitchen.
At first, when I said I’d bought him roses, he gave me a very doubtful sideways gaze. Apparently he thought I meant cut flowers, not plants, which are perhaps less than manly.
So our first roses will be fragrant white Icebergs, the Spanish dry-weather variety La Sevillana with its velvety red semi-double blooms and Blue Moons. I’ve also been given a red and yellow striped rose called Abrakadabra which seems almost reptilian; it’s not fragrant but has novelty value.
And in choosing just these few blooms for a garden I swore I wasn’t interested in, I’ve fallen in love with roses. I remember now, why, as a little girl I’d wander past the old-fashioned cottage gardens in my neighborhood, collecting the petals of the loveliest blooms (much to their owners’ disgust, I’m sure).
For my daughter, next, I’ll buy the long-stemmed pink ‘Eiffel Towers’ to remind her of her future travel ambitions; and next time the Show comes around I’ll take note of the winners in the ‘most fragrant’ rose competition. In the meantime I’ll rifle through the selection of heritage roses at diggers.com and maybe, in the far future, when I’m sitting on the deck of my ‘one-day’ house on a hot night I’ll smell the scent of our family roses rising on the east winds.
It seems like there’s new beginnings everywhere…and it’s not even spring yet. Tomorrow, after more than 20 years as a newspaperwoman, I will embark on my first permanent (part-time) contract as a teacher.
TheGirl has won a scholarship to my own long-ago boarding school and will move away next year.
After all this time, there’s a toddler in the house again. The last time I lived this life I had another toddler boy who would collect the eggs in bare feet every morning and hide under the snowpeas to eat them warm from the vines.
Now TheBoy is a lanky gel-haired, skinny-jeaned giant who has spent the past few months chopping down trees, tearing down fences, burning both and enjoying his first informal driving lessons in the farm beast BigRed.
This time around, the newest terrible two-year-old is already enjoying the adventure of leaping through chest-high grass in his gum boots, climbing the fig tree and parking his mini-mower alongside of Dad’s.
MyMan is starting again too, after a failed 14-year-marriage and his own family…here he is in his childhood town, with ‘the one who got away’ in high school, building a new life.
Eternal optimists – that’s us.
