Happy New Gardenland Year 2024

 It's a Leap Year, so we have extra days in Feb this year. The rain fell and the sun rose...another day in paradise aka Riverpark, or a little rectangular section of it. 

Dusty, the new resident cat, has given the birdlife a run for its money, and scared the living daylights out of numerous lizards/skinks. She originally came with a bell but, she shrugged those (both of them) including her engraved name tag with my phone number on it. Dusty, you supposed to catch rodents! Instead she follows me round when I trail grasses and flowers. I'm training her for the cat circus. I figure once she gets good enough she can go on Shortland Street as the clinic cat. 

I am considering also auditioning, as palliative care nurse (sorry there's nothing more we can do for you) or florist since my handwriting isn't bad enough to be a doctor and my latin only extends to plant names. Having a herbalist on Shortland Street would not do, they only use synthetic chemical drugs and 3M products. Well actually they use placebos and the blood is just watered down strawberry jam. In an ideal world there would be an acupuncturist at the clinic sticking pins into people. When you have acupuncture, all the secrets and traumas come out, it's almost as good as having a confessional/lie detector test. 

Sorry. I am rambling again. Plants! Yes they are now decorated in solar lights. Thank you Warehouse sale. My tomatoes are bearing fruit and pumpkins are flowering. I put in dusty miller which should be able to cope with the summer sun. Lobelia and helichrysum for edging.  Kings Plants Barn are bombarding me with emails nearly everyday saying I must come in and spend lots of money and take home all their plants. I think its nice they think their customers have endless streams of money to spend all on plants. 

Workloads increasing

 As the sun shines we make more and more hay. 

It's the way of the seasons, everyone frustrated they can't garden when its wet, but then with more daylight hours you can't garden enough. Weeds grow, get pulled out then grow again. 

Gardeners get stressed too, worrying that they can't do enough. But its not like I don't have my own garden to tend, which, if I was doing everyone else's, means my own is neglected. I don't feel ownership or kaitaiki of the whenua if I'm constantly being harangued about it or not allowed to do this or that. I thought about this as I stepped into the community garden and given the not so subtle message that I wasn't around enough. Well try looking after someone who may be terminally ill and caring for anyone outside your family just takes second place, I'm sorry and there are not two of me. Oh to be born a twin.

This is why I don't judge other peoples gardens. They do the best they can with the time they have. If it's not in their own backyard, there's the cost of time and fuel to get to the garden, tools, and other resources. Don't make a rod for your back is what I say as I pulled out the remaining broccoli and sprinkled what were meant to be wildflowers in the empty plot. A bit late. The wildflowers came with a dense A4 page of instructions that only rivaled the mushroom kit in complexity. 

I thought you just scattered the wildflowers wildly around and flowers grew up wild. Why did they need lime and coddling and raking and scattering medium and 4-6 weeks of moisture AND roundup spray before hand?? That wasn't really the definition of wild. They should rename them something like farmflowers or certified bee pollination centres. 

I'd been given a seed bomb and chucked it in my garden curious to find out when it would go off. The best seed bombs are tomatoes and citrus, particularly lemons. Why does gardening have to feel like hard work and drudgery, when instead it could be a seed throwing party? I would love to throw tomatoes and citrus around or squash grapes with my barefeet. Potato harvesting can be a treasure hunt, and weeding can also be a hide and seek game. With a machete. 

But no within the norms of straight lines and machinery, crop circles are just aberrations. I feel this is what machines do, take all the fun out of it, until its just a mindless job requiring headphones and steel rulers and weed mat pins. Inputs and outputs. Thanks to primary industry and fake christmas trees. We have all these wilding pines, and we import fake christmas trees from China, who must wonder what crazy people buy this junk. Its ok I was once a crazy person too but after given too many paper (and chocolate) roses I just wanted the real thing. 

Growing up

 Like my lilies?

They've suddenly burst into flower and lend the corner of the deck an exuberant touch and it's not Mother's Day either. 

I found putting my foot down worked and good news is, I may actually have some REAL garden work over the next few months (apart from my own garden that is) which may keep widows happy. I have dealt with both kinds of widow, the genuine widows who need help with their gardens, and the other kind I sometimes want to run a mile from  - black widows who are never happy with anything you do. 

Thankfully I've come across more genuine widows than black widows and Lord knows fewer and fewer have daughters that will help them if they haven't all run away and/or married off themselves. I've learned to accept this in life and never bothered by criticism because its almost universal that mothers dislike their daughters and don't get along with them. The Queen after all, could never get away from HER mother. Her palace(s) was so huge that she wanted to be close to her because living in a 250 room house it seems a bit strange to just move to another apartment just so you can be alone, it's not as if she needed the extra space. 

My counselor looked at me with pity in her eyes. Is there anything you struggle with? I go, oh no not really. Mum's always complained about me and to me and in front of everyone else as well its nothing new and nothing I can do anything about. 

I think she was secretly wondering if I was going to move out (where to?) and throw in the towel as well as cart mum off to a rest home/retirement village. I'd worked in those before and knew they were good for some people and hell for everyone else. It was always eerie in those places (palaces?) though because I would be the youngest person there. And it was sort of like Downton Abbey. Except the people you were servants to were just the elderly. 

No I said, I have my own room (library) and my garden and I don't really need anything else. But a massage would be nice. 

Spray and walk away/get cancer

 Gardening for other people isn't the joy its cracked out to be - especially if the people you are gardening for aren't actually gardeners - they hate gardens and would never do it themselves, so what they are really asking is you do all the dirty work for them and NOT have a garden at all.

I've often come across this attitude that for some people, gardening involves spraying herbicides to kill all plant life that's in the way. So I've decided to say no to anyone who asks me to do that. I am quite happy to hand weed so that you can enjoy your garden of the plants you DO have, but to ask me to expose myself to harmful chemicals and kill whatever is growing on your property just because you are unable to get down on your hands and knees or that it will take too much time to do, is like asking me to go to war with napalm.

I conscentiously object. 

And I'm sorry I am not sacrificing my life so your 'garden' can look 'tidy'. 

I am quite happy to do pruning, or a bit of weeding, hedge clipping, mulching, watering or even shock horror...propagating which involves actual growing of plants. But please don't ask me or even think about getting me hooked up with a backpack sprayer with a lethal chemical.

I have known too many people who've died of exposure and inevitable cancer to toxic chemicals (and it can happen very quickly) to want to do something so stupid. 

So there have said that as a public declaration. 

I don't have a 'gro safe' (they can't even spell) certification nor would I consider getting one. I would not ever sell Roundup to anyone. I have enough problems being exposed to petrol fumes everytime I get behind the wheel of a car on the Auckland motorway (headaches, brain fog) and not exercising my legs so that they atrophy from underuse. So whether its lung or lymphoma cancer I'm a bit risk averse and want to keep my life thank you very much.