It's 27.9 degrees and I am wilting. Of course it's my day off but funny that there seems to be always working bees on my day off. By the time I got to Woodside Garden everyone was having morning tea. Good afternoon they said.
I tipped my hat. I don't think they have forgiven me for going off to get a job gardening for another garden. It's as if I committed adultery or something. My lack of enthusiasm for another morning's gardening when I'd spent 5 days waking up at 4:30 am working outside all day and mowing lawns kind of showed.
However that wasn't so bad as another person who rang me, who shall remain nameless, early one Saturday morning, and asked me what I was doing. I said I was hanging out the washing, what are you doing? This caller then proceeded to demand my gardening services and said I was to do her garden for $15 an hour. What, below minimum wage, on my day off as well?
I kindly demurred. Well what I said was, I'm kind of busy (hanging out the washing). I did not suggest that she go do it herself, but as I was about to say something more like perhaps and how are you? She hung up without saying goodbye.
Very odd. This is beside all the people asking me for money now that I have a job. As if I am now a bank with reasonable terms. They are not aware that the cafe has put up the prices of sausage rolls. I am working so that I can earn enough for my lunch. If I was not working I would be living on potato chips and ice cream, such is the 'food' my Dad used to provide me.
So I have decided it's my week off and I am going to act like an unemployed person and when people ask me what I am doing I will say absolutely nothing. Hooray! Literally I will just smile at them and wave while they fume and wonder why I am not doing any work. Isn't it wonderful to not be busy?
I am reading 'A sense of humus, A bedside book of Garden Humour' by Diana Anthony. Apparently, in Merry Olde Englande such was the class divide that ladies were not actually allowed to garden. All they had to do was direct other people to do it. Heaven forbid if you got your hands dirty that meant you were a 'working woman' and that was just below the pale. So that is why it was suddenly very shocking that a lady dared to do gardening as that was men's work. I have to wonder what ladies actually did back then if they weren't allowed to garden. Maybe they expired from writing too many novels fantasising about what they could do instead. They weren't allowed to be mothers either cos they would pay a nanny to do that, and they would also have a cook, and a chauffeur, and a maid. However I have given up feeling sorry for upper class aristocrats who are barred from working with their hands, so that all their creative input is just about buying stuff to fill up their grand houses until they run out of money and room, whichever came first. It's just they were the only ones that were actually writing lavish gardening books, because us ordinary mortals were of course illiterate yokels who hadn't a hope of a publishing deal. Thank you internet that the field has levelled and anyone can write and share whatever gardening wisdom they have learned! Such as stop watering potatoes once they've flowered and gone yellow or they will rot.
In New Gardenland I've put in bedding begonias, divided a cat tail that wasn't doing well in it's hanging basket pot so put in the ground, and tidied up the border. I've noticed sweet peas started germinating from last season. This week I am just going to sit back, relax and watch it all grow. Did I tell you it's 27 degrees. Well it's just turned 28.
