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Thursday 5 November 2009

A Change of Pace

Hi folks,

Sorry for the long gap between posts, the change in season rather unsettled me so I’ve been neglecting the garden almost as much as I’ve been neglecting the blog.

So, summer’s over, the toms are all but gone, the leaves have turned golden and all is quiet on the terrace. I think until Spring I’ll take the blog fortnightly. We’ll see.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to since I last wrote:

1) Planted too much spinach again – not entirely sure what I was thinking as I did exactly the same thing last year. There are eight huge tubs of it, all thriving and growing at quite a pace. Unfortunately I don’t like spinach all that much. I was consoling myself with the thought that I’d just make lots of wholesome soups over the winter but then I attempted to make a leak and potato one and I can assure you I won’t be trying that again in a hurry. I always seem to fail at the easy things.

2) For anyone who managed to miss my unrelenting moaning about the nonexistent lettuce, it failed to materialise this spring so I’m trying again for winter lettuce. I’ve got a few in pots under cover but am also trying a couple in hanging baskets where the tumbling tomatoes were. I doubt that it’ll work but just imagine how delicious it will look if it does.

3) The cauliflowers were doing well at first but have since started to look a little sad. I think I’ll repot them and see what happens.

4) Up to old tricks again and have stubbornly decided that I will beat the change of season by just bringing everything inside. Mixed success so far. As usual the sodding basil is refusing to grow. Do you know, I have never managed to successfully grow basil from seed? It’s supposed to be the easiest sodding one. Whatever.

5) Struggling a little with my Mimosa. I got it in memory of my dog who died earlier this year. I chose it in part because its beautiful waiflike scraggly appearance reminded me of our beautiful waiflike scraggly Smiff, but also because the card promised an abundance of yellow flowers over the winter that would make me smile.

It seemed to do well at first but as the weather began to change its main stalk started to bald, and it just kept growing and growing and growing - much like Jack’s beanstalk. So I nipped out its growing tip, and still it grew. I pulled it out again, continued to grow. Much to my despair this pattern continued for a good few weeks until eventually I gave up and left it alone. It’s since stopped growing up and started to grow out as I had hoped and I can now see little buds waiting to burst open. Sometimes non-interference really is the best method.

I was worried about trying to grow something in memory. I worried that I would be too invested in it and that it would just bring the sadness back if it failed. Then I realised that whilst that may be true and may still happen (I’ll keep you posted), well, there’s nowt wrong with being invested in your garden.

When we were kids my mum bought our family house because she “liked the purple flowering plant in the garden”. It was a good house. Good decision.

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4 comments:

@Gatulino said...

Glad to see you back!

May I suggest you try and bake the spinach into some sort of cake?

Nice pic.

Anonymous said...

My Mimosa died after 3 wonderful winters. I am still trying to figure out what happened. I will grew to 6ft and the flowers were lovely. Ghis

ShopGirl said...

spinach cooked with raisins and pine nuts is lovely. mmm. wish I'd grown some. keep writing!

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