Tag Archives: patience

Mad for Mould

A love letter to an unsung garden hero

Winter brings with it a green carpet. The November rains return in earnest to tell us winter is on her way. The grasses, dry and brown from summer heat, come alive in the cool dampness. Moss creeps over bare earth, ensuring every footstep is cushioned by emeralds.

Along with the green comes the leaves, tumbling down to land like jewels upon the lawn. Yellow, red, orange, and tawny brown compete for pride of place. Those leaves that still cling to skeletal branches stand out beautifully against the cold, grey skies. It is like a treasure has been spilt upon the ground from the benevolent heavens above.

In fact, it is the lawns and not the streets that are paved in gold. For the gardener, each leaf is more valuable than one would dare imagine.

It is my task on this late November day to collect the leaves.

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I Learned the Secret to Everything In Aunt Nancy’s Basement

(Some assembly required)

Aunt Nancy’s small farm house had a basement. Our cookie cutter suburban tract home had no basement. Maybe this is why I spent so many hours each summer exploring the dark crannies and nooks of this mysterious underground room.

This wasn’t the spooky basement that popular culture had prepared me for. Aunt Nancy’s basement was neat and orderly. A magical place where glittering canning jars with jewel-tone contents were stacked to the ceiling on strong wooden shelves. A place where bunches of onions and braids of garlic were tacked onto the supports for those shelves. Along the bottom, crates of winter squashes, apples, and potatoes lay nestled in protective nests of shredded newspaper and straw.

In one corner a scrap of carpet covered the floor, and atop it sat a few broken down armchairs and an old sagging couch. Stacks of board games and old magazines sat on a shelf. Dubbed “Twister Corner” by my auntie’s family, this was where we all went when funnel clouds threatened. It was also where my cousins and I played when it was too dark or too rainy to go outside.

One set of shelves in Twister Corner held something different, though.

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Without Effort, There Is No Contentment

The homespun foodie’s week in review, Oct 5–11

Nothing in life should come without effort, with the exceptions of sleep and love.

I know that I harp on the same ol’ themes over and over —

  • There is enough for all of our need, but not all of our greed.
  • The simple things are the best things.
  • Waste not, want not, and be fulfilled.
  • We are not main characters in the tableau of life.
  • Good food, good people, and hope is what makes the world go around.

These themes may be simple, perhaps even a bit old fashioned, but I shall take them any day over the current world themes of greed, consumption, hate, and destruction. Call me a curmudgeon, but those viral videos of destroying things for “ASMR” or unboxing things to engender envious consumption or behaving badly simply to encourage engagement really upsets me. They aren’t just a symptom of the hatefulness of the billionaire class that has destroyed modern culture, they are also direct cause of it.

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The Myth of the Patient Gardener

Garden lessons are life lessons

All great things start small. Photo by Filip Urban on Unsplash

Gardeners aren’t patient people.

Oh, it may appear to the uninitiated that gardeners are patient. How else do we wait so long for a seed to grow into a sprout and a sprout to grow large enough to produce a tomato? Who else can play a long game and plant a tree today knowing that it won’t provide shade enough to host a teddy bear picnic for at least another decade?

Yet, I still stand by my statement — gardeners ARE NOT patient people.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a new garden, particularly a new ornamental or cutting garden. All too often, in an effort to make the garden look full and established, small perennials are planted nearly on top of their neighbor.

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