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Frosty mornings hung on through the month of May.
Spring was wintry, we couldn’t shake the grip of cold; the switch into heat has been sudden, and equally stubborn.
At Paddock Garden the grass has been cut and all the stubble is biscuity-beige. If you look closely there is green underneath- the earth here is rich, though clay-thick in places, and not everything is nourished.
We study the leafless plum and cherry saplings wondering what we did wrong, whether the allelopathic ash trees have told them ‘you can't grow here’ or a pest or a disease or drought overcame them? Will they resurge? We won’t know for sure till winter returns. It feels at first like a condemnation but of course it is only part of our educational gambling.
All the other trees are thriving, even the ones near swallowed by brambles in the bottom hedge. There are cherries, plums, pears, and apples in miniature, swelling out of slender wood. Where the tractor couldn’t reach the grasses are eye height, tipped with pink-gold seeds; they swoosh in the wind, we love the sound of it.
A scarlet rose winds around the iron fence, poking out bold blossoms; a yellow rosebud nestles under a blackthorn thicket; magenta rosa rugosas blare their colours from tangles of sedge, rye, and false oat.
Shiny black-wrapped bales sit like fat beetles, waiting to be trailered away.
We have a potato patch, they are close to harvest time. Leaves stick up and spill out like plumage. Even some of the fragile flower seeds we sowed around the edges are reaching up in green frills.
We have built a compost bay for the compost toilet waste, there is a path strimmed from the shed; these are now known as the crapstack, the crapshack, and the craptrack.
(Grandchild 7 almost provided the first poop - but the loud fart that actually exited his nether parts did yield great merriment. Laughter is our most successful crop.)
There’s much to do, there’s more than a lifetime’s worth of learning, and, as usual, we are reminding ourselves to jump in, to blunder, to marvel: to bloom and laugh.
At Paddock Garden the grass has been cut and all the stubble is biscuity-beige. If you look closely there is green underneath- the earth here is rich, though clay-thick in places, and not everything is nourished.
We study the leafless plum and cherry saplings wondering what we did wrong, whether the allelopathic ash trees have told them ‘you can't grow here’ or a pest or a disease or drought overcame them? Will they resurge? We won’t know for sure till winter returns. It feels at first like a condemnation but of course it is only part of our educational gambling.
All the other trees are thriving, even the ones near swallowed by brambles in the bottom hedge. There are cherries, plums, pears, and apples in miniature, swelling out of slender wood. Where the tractor couldn’t reach the grasses are eye height, tipped with pink-gold seeds; they swoosh in the wind, we love the sound of it.
A scarlet rose winds around the iron fence, poking out bold blossoms; a yellow rosebud nestles under a blackthorn thicket; magenta rosa rugosas blare their colours from tangles of sedge, rye, and false oat.
Shiny black-wrapped bales sit like fat beetles, waiting to be trailered away.
We have a potato patch, they are close to harvest time. Leaves stick up and spill out like plumage. Even some of the fragile flower seeds we sowed around the edges are reaching up in green frills.
We have built a compost bay for the compost toilet waste, there is a path strimmed from the shed; these are now known as the crapstack, the crapshack, and the craptrack.
(Grandchild 7 almost provided the first poop - but the loud fart that actually exited his nether parts did yield great merriment. Laughter is our most successful crop.)
There’s much to do, there’s more than a lifetime’s worth of learning, and, as usual, we are reminding ourselves to jump in, to blunder, to marvel: to bloom and laugh.
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| Crapstack under construction with assistance from Grandchild 4. The top picture is one of our rosa rugosas. |
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