Container Gardening

An avid and experienced gardener once told you about the procrastination inherent in the seed-planting process. You didn’t quite believe her, though you felt the downward tug.

Planting seeds is much funner when there is two of you doing it. Nevertheless, it takes two weeks of procrastination before you stand in the garage, at the beginning of the manfriend’s holidays, putting tiny little dots into rows of dark seed raising mix.

Such tiny dots, pushed such a little way down into the soil. Six millimetres down, then covered over with a little dirt, watered with some Seasol, then left behind with a faithless disbelief that anything at all is going to happen. The same fear you have to turn away from when you sit down to write, or to love, or to life.

Ten days later there are these little things poking themselves up out of the soil, the beginnings of the broccoli you will be shovelling into your mouth in several months’ time, if you haven’t planted them too late and the temperature proves too warm for them.

You have very little idea at all of what you are doing. And yet it seems to you, every time you find yourself immersed in something that has the whiff of oxygen about it that one of the keys to making a good life is just simply providing the containers for it to pour itself into and remembering to water.