After leaving the lush decadence of the TinyTrainHouse’s backyard, it’s very lovely to have a garden again.
In the midst of all this blackness, it’s the Most Amazing Man who begins to build a veggie patch in the urban backyard of The New House. The very back edge of the block we live on was once a laneway. A ten foot stretch of land that runs along our back fence is raised by a foot or two, and was overrun with thick kikuyu grass and an ugly, greedy cactus when we first moved in.
The Most Amazing Man puts old rugs over the bright green grass to kill it, starving it of a sunlight for a few weeks. Then he attacks it with a pickaxe, turning up lumps of yellowed weeds until the soil is revealed, rich and dark and moist-smelling; filled with fat, happy worms.
We plant veggies. Tomatoes bought as saplings from Bunnings. Tiny chilli and basil seedlings. We rescue a small parsley plant from the corner of the raised section, making us think it’s not this patch of ground’s first incarnation as a vegetable bed.
We plant seeds to sprout- calendula, sugar snap peas, star and moon watermelons. The tiny chubby hands of the kidlets pushing dirt across freshly planted seeds carries whispers of everything that’s good in the world.
Gardening makes me miss my gran so badly. But there’s therapy in it too. Something about dirt under your fingernails, pulling stubborn grass from the ground as it re-grows and makes a mess of the garden bed… it’s therapeutic. It’s soul food.
It’s satisfaction. We weed and water and tend to it daily, the Most Amazing Man and I. We watch the slowly unfurling leaves,the flowers that bud and bloom. We watch in wonderment at what we’re creating here.
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I keep meaning to get my garden planted but it’s one of many things on a to do list haha. one day…
Vanessa recently posted…Blog Planning: Christmas Holidays
Gardening is so calming. I love to get in there and make order out of the chaos, getting everything looking lovely and neat and just right. I hope all your seeds sprout and you get to make awesome meals from the stuff you grow.
Being always on the move, I haven’t got a garden exactly, but I do have a big collection of potted succulents (the only plants I can utterly neglect and still have them thrive) that I drag around arranging them all is so satisfying. Perhaps one day I’ll have a big garden…
Whoa, Molly! recently posted…Goodbye Little Yellow House
I watch the ebb and flow of your moods, reading intermittently as I do, and feel such a boost when you’re up. I can sense how the warmth we’re having at last gets you going again, gives you a lift. Your vitamin D is replenished, and so is your mood.
Good on you, Lori…….wonderful to watch your tenacity and resilience pay dividends like this.