I've taken some time out, though summer work still beckons.
Such as watering pots, and planting up chillies, and clearing weeds out from tomato plants, netting them and companion planting with marigolds. I've been to the beach to gather seaweed mulch and sand for the garden. I bought a packet of sunflower seeds and potted up basil.
My watermelon shrivelled up one day and I despaired - my transplants don't seem to take. I don't have a spare. I reckon I need knee deep raised beds to grow anything worthwhile harvesting in this clay soil of mine. It's just getting them past mum.
My dream is to heal this land after reading horrific stories of dustbowl America, and drought, and erosion, and also the prospect of having to go live in Australia. I only say this because I know several people who got jobs and moved as its cheaper to live there and people can actually afford a home, even to rent. Michaela and her family are moving to Aussie and leaving behind the little backyard garden project that Brent installed for her and I haven't really asked who will look after it now.
But, as they say charity begins at home, if I'm able to grow anything here with what I've got then I won't need to move to someone else's patch. I heard Myra my rather difficult widow friend is now moving to her retirement village and her home is being bulldozed, to make way for three townhouses. For some reason only known to her all her household effects are somehow going to fit into a small 2 bedroom villa which I had estimated would take another year or so to sort out, except she only has three days. I thought of the proverb about the camel going through the eye of the needle, but then there's the caveat - nothing is impossible for God. She's either going to squeeze everything in, or, just enter with nothing but the clothes on her back and God will replace everything on the other side. A goat called Hans is eating all her kikuyu. Myra gifted me a sharpening stone and an old fork and spade for the community garden. And some bamboo stakes.
I was thinking maybe could borrow Hans for St Giles. Things are all coming to a head for St Giles as theres going to be meetings and more meetings (one of which I myself am chairing or coordinating) but I will make sure these meetings will be really short, like the time it takes for us to walk around the church grounds so we won't have time to sit down and have cups of tea it will be all action. It could possibly even be recorded on my smartphone so nobody will even have to take down the minutes.
That's the problem with staying in one place forever. You kind of become attached and send down roots and don't want to be moved. Everyone else may move away but you're still there growing right where you've been planted. I don't know whether it's because I don't really have a choice, or its because at one time I thought I did but it got taken away from me. Whatever it is, I'm still here and don't intend on moving, because I don't really have anywhere else to go.
If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again I won't look any further than my own backyard because if it isn't' there then I never really lost it to begin with, isn't that right Dorothy?
