If I can be Candide with you…
If you wondered what’s been happening chez inflatable over the last three weeks or so (is it really that long? apparently so).. then this is a partial answer.
The sun has finally come out, and the magazines and books say I can cautiously begin to plant out seeds and seedlings.
I haven’t had my own garden for a long time and old-gitdom has been calling me for a while. We arrived in this house a little too late to plant anything and I’ve been going a bit crazy waiting for spring. I constructed those beds over the winter, and I’ve been waiting impatiently for my chance turn them into more than big brown rectangles filled with well rotted manure.
They may not look like much now, but they have have the makings of carrots, beans, garlic, broccoli, potatoes (two kinds), turnips, kale, lettuce, onion and leeks in them. I may have missed something. In the background there are some huge rhubarb plants. Up against that wall various berry bushes are beginning to show some leaf. At either side of the picture are an apple tree and a cherry tree.
What’s that got to do with writing? Well not a lot, I suppose unless we want to try a metaphor about nurturing plants like ideas, and thinning out the failures, and all that malarky? No, me neither. I’m still writing every day, and studying too. But sometimes.. you have to cultivate your garden.
Wait, I have a picture somewhere of the beds under construction. Here you go. I had to go to Facebook to get that, and a couple of things struck me.
Firstly, I didn’t have a single notification waiting for me after six months absence. NOT A SINGLE ONE.
Oh.. but.. It dawns on me that this might have something precisely to do with the fact that I’m the kind of person who puts up pictures of raised beds on my blog. Damn. If I go to a dinner party (really very unlikely), I’ll probably discover that I’ve become that guy who spends all his time weighing up the merits of competing A-roads and their traffic patterns.
And secondly, I note that friend of Inflatable Cheryl Ossola has signed up for an MFA. I was supposed to be doing that this year. Hmm. I’ll have to give that some thought.
In the meantime, here are my seedlings. There are two kinds of tomato there, and some peppers. And brussels sprouts. And a lemon. I’m chitting potatoes too.. which sounds a lot more unpleasant than it actually is. Oh and lots of stuff.
I’m going to buy an irrigation kit thingie tomorrow. And a thing for extracting dandelions.
Thought you’d like to know that.
