spring

Here we go again…

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-10-16-16-04-30It’s a sight to strike fear in my heart.

October 16th and the temperature hit 30°C (86°F) and humidity is 33%.

Thirty degrees is supposed to be a height –of-summer oddity. It’s the day you drop everything and head to the beach, because there are only a handful of days this warm in a summer.

Except that it’s the middle of spring.

And this happened last year.

And the year before.

And it heralds a third year of drought for us.

A third year of deciding which plants will be watered (and survive), and which ones will not (and probably die).

It will be a third year of expensive hay that has to be brought in for the goats, because the grass will brown off in November.

A third year in which the vegetable seedlings grow too fast too early, then struggle to set fruit in the dry heat.

Just thinking about it makes me grim.

But I suppose it also means a summer of incredible hot days at the beach. A summer in which I don’t need a wetsuit to enjoy the ocean. A summer of ice cream and swimming.

I enjoy these things. I really do. It’s a good thing they come along with drought. If I go to the beach, I can ignore the shrivelling garden at home…sort of.

 

Time for Thyme

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-10-10-09-15-06Thyme is one of my favourite herbs. In spring, its lush new growth encourages me to put it in almost everything. Nearly everything is better with thyme, but it is especially good with braised carrots, eggs, pumpkin, and mushrooms. Mixed with good olive oil, also makes an excellent marinade for bocconcini—little mozzarella balls.

It’s one of those herbs that we plant more of than we need for culinary use, because it’s so pretty in the garden. There are around 400 varieties of thyme. Some are more culinary, others are more ornamental. Some grow into 30 cm tall shrubs, others creep low to the ground.

Thyme is a tough little plant. It puts up with hot dry conditions, and recovers from even the most aggressive pruning. The low-growing varieties can even be used as a fragrant lawn (though at our house, there’s no stopping the couch grass coming up through it).

Its white, pink or purple flowers are attractive to a wide range of insects. On ours, we regularly have honey bees bumble bees, flower flies, and butterflies—and the preying mantids that eat them.

Truly, you can never have too much thyme.

Spring Roller Coaster

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rollercoaster_expedition_geforce_holiday_park_germany

Photo: Boris23; Wikimedia, public domain

The kids are back at school today after two weeks of school holidays. It’s the last term of the school year, and the start of what I always think of as a roller coaster ride.

For the past two weeks we’ve been slowly climbing the first hill. I could hear the tik-tik-tik of the chain winching us up, to perch at the top of the slope. Today we begin the descent to the end of the year. It will start slowly—I’ll be lulled into thinking I have plenty of time to do the gardening, get all the nagging spring DIY done, think about Christmas gifts, plan summer’s vacations. But before I know it, we’ll be hurtling along toward the end of the year, much faster than I anticipated. The garden will take longer that I’d hoped. The end-of-the-year school activities will start piling up. I’ll put off worrying about Christmas gifts until I’m frantic about it. Three DIY projects will balloon into ten. Late frost will keep me scrambling to protect plants. Livestock will get sick and require extra care. School will end much sooner than I’d like it to.

Time will compress. A month will be over in a week. A week will last a day. A day will be over in a blink of the eye.

Before I know it, we’ll be heading into the week before Christmas, and my Spring to-do list will be every bit as long as it is today.

I’ve learned to accept this state. I’ve almost learned to enjoy the frenetic insanity of the combination of the end of the school year, holidays, and spring gardening all at once.

But every year I sit here at the top of the roller coaster wondering if I really should have gotten on in the first place.

Repeating Myself

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-10-01-16-25-02-hdrThree quarters of the way through the second year of daily blogging, I begin to feel that I’m repeating myself. Yesterday I took a couple of photos of the beautiful asparagus coming up in the garden, and was all set to blog about it. But when I looked at the photo, I realised I blogged about asparagus last year. I did the same with artichokes last week.

Which is, of course, one of the joys of gardening. There is a rhythm to it. Its seasonality is guaranteed. Spring always follows winter, and spring brings asparagus and artichokes, lettuce and spinach, daffodils and tulips. Spring will eventually mature into summer, with eggplant, peppers, and zucchini. Summer will fade to autumn pumpkins and the last ears of sweet corn. And winter will bring cabbages and broccoli, and an excuse to stay indoors and bake cookies.

There is uncertainty, of course—there are hail storms, drought, and pests—but the fundamental rhythm is the same from year to year.

There is comfort in that. Though it means I may repeat myself from time to time on the blog, it is something I can count on. Life changes from day to day—the kids grow up, jobs change, we may move half way across the world—nothing is certain. But I always know where I stand in the seasons—always changing, but always predictable.

 

Ruthless

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-09-26-14-21-42I started potting up the tomatoes today.

I start my tomatoes in six-packs (the plant kind, not the beer kind), planting two seeds per cell, to ensure I get at least six plants out of each six-pack. And truth is that I probably only need six plants out of each six-pack. Having two plants in a cell gives me the opportunity to cull small or weak plants.

Except that, faced with two perfectly fine plants in a cell, I can’t possibly cull one, so I pot them both up separately. I’m just not very good at being ruthless and culling the plants I don’t need.

Which is how I end up, every year, with nearly twice as many tomatoes as I have space for in the garden. I give away quite a few, and always save some to replace the ones that are inevitably killed by a late frost or the neighbour’s overspray. Still, some years I end up throwing a dozen or more on the compost pile after they’ve languished in their pots unplanted until nearly Christmas.

This year, I purposely planted fewer six-packs than I usually do—if the plants aren’t there, I can’t pot up too many, right? But somehow, I still find myself with over a hundred tomato plants. That’s much better than previous years—I have space for 80 tomato plants—but it’s still probably more than I’ll use, even after losses.

With luck, though, I’ll be able to find homes for all the tomatoes, either here or in someone else’s vegetable garden, and I can avoid the annual cull.

Order from Chaos

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-09-24-15-04-00There’s something pleasing about the garden as I start to prepare the beds. I can’t prepare the whole garden at once—it’s simply too big—so I do it bed by bed. Two or four a weekend, until all thirty-two are done.

I’ve planned the garden over winter, so I know what will be planted in each bed. I choose which beds to prepare each weekend based on when each crop gets planted. So I end up with a patchwork of beds—some waist-high in weeds, others beautifully prepared and ready for planting, some already planted. Every weekend, the weeds are fewer and the tidy beds more numerous.

Little by little the work gets done, the garden gets planted, until that magical day in mid-November when it’s all done, and neat rows have replaced sprawling weeds.

 

Ah…Spring…

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-09-12-08-15-00There’s nothing like springtime…

…to make you realise how filthy the windows are.

Not quite warm enough to have them open, but nice enough that you want to look outside more frequently than you did in winter.

Like most people, I don’t particularly enjoy washing windows. But as cleaning jobs go, it’s one of the most rewarding. Who notices if there’s a little extra cat hair on the rug? But look out the window, and the fingerprints, grime, and mould of winter are painfully obvious.

Unfortunately, springtime is such a busy time for me, I don’t always have time to clean the windows. I have to be strategic about it. My office windows are the first to be cleaned—I spend all day in there, and dirty windows are particularly irritating.

Next are the kitchen windows—I like to look out while washing dishes, but not if there are streaks of bird poo on the windows.

Then come the dining room windows—who wants to look through grime while eating dinner, especially now that it’s light enough to see something outside at dinnertime?

Bedrooms, living room, bathroom…they can all wait—I don’t spend much time in any of those rooms during the day, and I don’t notice dirty windows at night. Maybe someone else will wash them if I don’t.

A List of Garden Don’ts

/ Robinne Weiss / 4 Comments

2016-01-16 17.22.14 HDR smAs I head into spring, I always try to bear in mind my list of garden don’ts…

  1. Don’t put the compost pile next to the greenhouse. The rats and mice go straight from the compost to the greenhouse, where they devour everything in sight.
  2. Don’t plant so many zucchinis. No. I mean it. One zucchini plant can feed a small village. Just don’t do it.
  3. Don’t put the pumpkins near a path. You don’t need to do anything to them until long after all the other crops are finished, so tuck them away from heavy traffic areas. Otherwise, they’ll take over your paths. Same goes for potatoes, melons, and broad beans.
  4. Don’t take zucchini to every social function you attend. See point number 2. Even your friends can’t eat all that zucchini.
  5. Don’t plant corn where it will shade the tomatoes.
  6. Don’t freeze your extra zucchini. See point number 2. If you must freeze zucchini, grate it first, and don’t freeze more than what you can use in two batches of zucchini bread.
  7. Don’t plant horseradish. Anywhere. For any reason. It’s fine if you love horseradish. But don’t plant it. Get it from a friend who made the mistake of planting horseradish once ten years ago.
  8. Don’t save extra zucchini in the fridge. See point number 2. There will be more tomorrow, and you won’t eat the ones in the fridge. Get a pig or goat instead and feed the zucchini to it.
  9. Don’t water before you weed. It makes for unpleasant working conditions.
  10. Don’t worry. Your local food bank probably accepts zucchini.

Captive

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3654 smThe siren song of spring has taken me outdoors
Against my will…
Or not.

And so, I will not write today
I am in the garden.

I will not post a blog
I am weeding the strawberries.

I will not sweep the floors or clean the bathroom
I am turning soil.

I am unlikely, even
To worry about what to cook for dinner
Until it is too late to do anything
But the simplest meal.

I am in the clutches of sunshine
Lured away by birdsong
Captured by the earth.