Grandmothers and gardening

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?

~ Wendell Berry

Both of my grandmothers were gardeners. Tulla, my father's mother, lived in a granny flat attached to the house where my family lived for 15 years before my parents rustled up enough of a deposit to buy a house of their own.  Tulla was out there every single day from the day I was born, and years and years after we had moved, right up until the time she went into a nursing home in her late eighties.  I think Wendell Berry's words would have resonated in Tulla's soul.  She was a bitter old thing in many ways, and there was more than one occasion where I was bewildered by her bizarre suspicion even of members of her own family at times.  But her garden was her solace and her live, silent companion.  I would pay good money to have one more taste of one of her meals, cooked with the produce that came fresh from her own planting.

As far as I'm concerned we should have let Tulla stay at home and continue gardening until she dropped dead right there on the spot, and then bury her right in the middle of one of her garden beds that was full of worms and dark, rich compost.

When I was born my mother's mum, Grandma, lived in Boronia with Grandpa on a double block.  Their veggie garden was the most badass veggie garden I've ever seen.  That's my auntie, Dawn, on the left there in this photo, with her famous legs.  Grandma is in the middle.  And that's my mummy on the right, carrying me.

That veggie garden was rows and rows.  It was such a commonplace thing 40 years ago.  Everybody grew their own veggies.  I have heard it said that these days there is less than half a week's supply of food in our supermarkets.  The intervening years have been very strange, and now we find it's an act of resistance and a wake-up from an eerie slumber to indulge in the subversive and tiny act of growing some of your own food.

The fatigue that has encroached and retreated in various degrees for over more than a decade has lifted a little recently, and on Sunday I pulled some weeds and lay down some newspaper and mulch in the veggie patch in preparation for some seedling planting next weekend.  I think in hindsight I may have overdid it, as there was a tearful meltdown in there as well, but I don't know I've overdid it until I've overdone it.  It's like being premenstrual for six straight months ... except for the times when I'm feeling fine.  Bizarre.

I think I'm on the right track with the pyroluria/heavy metal detox treatment.  I guess the meltdowns are not surprising when you consider that my body is ridding itself of a toxic cocktail it's been harbouring against its will for decades of high copper, antimony, beryllium, barium, cadmium, thallium ~ things I barely know how to spell let alone understand how I accumulated.

Although the cadmium I know - that's the legacy of 20 years of smoking those stupid cigarettes.  And yet even it is fascinating to realise that the low zinc levels I have obviously suffered from for decades may have contributed at least in part to why it was that I began smoking cigarettes - the cadmium in the cigarettes is a compensation for the effects of low zinc, and provides a grounding feeling to compensate for the spaciness caused by high copper.  Who woulda thunk? 

When I'm not having meltdowns and feeling that horrible familiar vulnerability when the world just crashes in like a tsunami and my body crashes down and I just can't cope, I'm starting to feel good again.  The hellish paranoia that has fogged up my body like my own personal cloud is beginning to go and I will never be able to quite put into words just how glad I am about that :)

In the last 10 years I've noticed a greater desire to begin gardening more, and growing more of my own food, but it's been something I haven't been able to put into much effect.  The gardening bug seems to be one that hits people as they grow older, especially women.  It hasn't been able to hit me yet, though I invite its invasion.  It's hit my auntie though, Tulla's daughter.  I never knew her to have a green thumb before but now, in the past several years, her garden has become a flourishing beauty full of variety, and she a member of her local gardening club.

The propensity towards gardening as you get older I think is a deepening into an understanding of and connection to your roots, both literally and figuratively.  I invite the gardening bug invasion.

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.

Planting Seeds

That tiny little dot in my hand is a broccoli seed.

I have felt strong resistance to getting out and planting seeds. Such a small thing, and I have procrastinated for several weeks about it. Weirdness. My art therapist assured me she still feels exactly the same sort of seed-planting resistance even after years of gardening.

She thinks the resistance is performance anxiety.

Ridiculous but potentially true - I possibly procrastinate planting my seeds because somewhere in my befuddled mind I worry they will not sprout. What a dick.

The process is very simple. It takes 15 minutes to pour seed raising mix into a seedling tray, make little furrows, and put your seeds in the furrows. Then you mark the spots with your little plastic ID sticks that you have written on in pencil ~ broccoli, cabbage, kale, leek, cauliflower ~ cover over the furrows with a bit more soil and that's it. I planted about 40 seeds today.

The seed tray just looks like a pile of dirt with nothing going on in it. There's a universe in there.

I caught up with B again yesterday. She was the lady who gave me some strawberry plants a few weeks ago. This time she came to my place and gave me some seeds, and some pak choi and marigold seedlings (marigolds are good to plant with your vegetables as they invite good bugs into the garden and keep away some nasty ones).

B drags her husband outside to admire her minuscule little seedlings that are, like, 5 mm high and have sprung up in less than a week, astoundingly.

"It makes me feel like God," she laughed.

I understand. All creative acts can cause delirium and dizziness if you stand up too quickly :) Even the ones where you're just shovin' in the seed :)

The Jersualem Artichoke That's Not

But in my judgement, which way soever they be drest and eaten they stir up and cause a filthie loathesome stinking winde with the bodie, thereby causing the belly to bee much pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine, than men.

John Goodyer, 17th century botanist

Safe to say that John Goodyer wasn't much partial to Jerusalem artichokes.

Safe to say also that our current use of the English language is not quite what it used to be :)

I planted some of this strange little vegetable after Maggie gave me one of them. A round tuber (which looks like a giant seed or nut.) I don't think I have ever eaten one in my life, but I liked the idea of planting a gift in my newly begun veggie garden.

It actually ended up growing about six feet tall. I really had absolutely no idea about what I was doing. That is a rather unsettling feeling, isn't it? I struggle with childlike play and exploration with no road map. I am a product of my Western existence. It unsettles me, makes me feel uncomfortable, but it is the way I grow. I actually feel more spiritually unsettled about my unsettledness, but that's another story :) It is good to be unsettled in such fashions. Even if it is something as small as growing a vegetable you know nothing abut.

No idea about when to harvest it, even at the beginning whether it was a globe artichoke or a Jerusalem artichoke, whether the vegetable grew on the plant or grew underground. I had always thought tubers meant that they were root vegetables, so I went on that suppositiion.

I harvested it yesterday, when Google told me to, about a month after it flowered. When I pulled it out, I still wasn't sure if what I was looking at was it. Was that thing there, that looked like the thing Maggie had given me in the beginning only multiplied - was that it?

It's sure easier when they're all just stacked together in the supermarket with ID tags on them :) Easier also when you know what the hell what you're growing looks like!

Turns out that I have actually harvested a rather large bowlful of this weird little thing which looks like giant pieces of ginger. No idea how to cook it, or even whether I'll like it, but a bit of experimentation, even if it's just eating a new vegetable, is always a fun sort of thing to do :) Funny where my inspiration comes from to try to stave off depression and look at the world through childlike eyes - but through a vegetable? Gee, I'm getting old! :)

The poor old Jerusalem artichoke isn't actually from Jerusalem - and isn't even an artichoke, either. Luckily vegetables don't have identity crises. They actually hail from North America and are related to the sunflower. I don't know how I am going to cook them yet, but I think I shall take John Goodyer's advice and eat them alone :)

Growth in Drought Conditions

I have had a leave of absence for the past three semesters from uni. I figured art therapy and uni were too much to do at that point in time - my doing-things threshold was pretty low. Problem is, it will be time to pick my degree up again in July and ... well, I can't say I'm all that enthused about it, to be honest. Which is patently silly and pointless thinking, because I have 1/4 of my degree to go, and I have done 18 subjects over 400,000 years, and to throw it in now would be something I would suspect borders the realms of stupid self-sabotage. It would defy logic.

Well, except for the logic that I really don't like my university - their motives are clear, their love for the bottom line and for equipping their students to go out and earn as much cash as possible blatant and frankly it just makes me feel old and idealistic and stupid to think that universities should be something devoted to higher learning as opposed to churning out cookie-cutter job marketeers. But what place idealism in these times except for around the fringes? I wish I had been around in the heady days of Gough Whitlamia when university education was free and the Arts revered.

I am tempted to let my degree lapse, to apply next year to Deakin, the university at which I began my degree. Deakin offers philosophy subjects; I have in fact already completed two of them. They also offer offline studying options which are also appealing.

Maybe it's good that universities are economically rationalised to within an inch of their lives. Herds the money-focussed elements into one large pen while the people on the outskirts can ply their wares and knowledge and practice with each other in peace. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of people out there who are generous with their time and knowledge when it comes to sharing their passions. I saw it yesterday in the chat I had with the man who designed the sensory garden at the Royal Talbot Hospital. I was there on an artist date of sorts, garnering ideas for this art space that has impaled itself in my head. He was happy to talk, to share his knowledge, for me to take photos. When people are passionate about what they do, what they know, what they have learnt, they pass it on. It is viral.

This man commented on how wonderful gardening is in its communality, the learning and sharing that is passed on from one person to another. My landlord was here the other day and we sat outside and chatted - he is always up for a philosophical discussion, teasing the complexity. Those sorts of people are rather thin on the ground so you take them when you can find them :) He inspected my tomato plant, it's tiny little fruits growing and ripening, and suggested that tomatoes need much more space to grow than my container can afford. I have this knowledge now, in my brain. Such a tiny small thing, but so much better to have gained it from someone who learnt it himself, than from a book, much as I voraciously love those.

I think that small pieces of learning coming virally from the mouths of others, the teaching that happens organically when people hang together, is much more richer and vibrant than the teaching that comes out of the academy. Instead of desks and curriculum and external assessment, there is interaction between human beings, rich, humous, adapted to its environment.

I wonder at how the Greek academy would spin in its grave at the paltry descendant that bleats tiredly these days in the West.

I am developing a slowly growing fondness and appreciation for succulents. The white one above, especially. Cotyledon orbiculata, 'silver waves'. My English blood yearns for green hills and lush foliage, especially when we are on fire, but there is a more subtle charm in the succulents that filled this garden yesterday, such variety of foliage and colour, all surviving in drought conditions.