Mother Earth's Garden

I have spent the day thinking and writing about politics, but this evening as I wandered through the garden I remembered Shakespear’s wonderful metaphor in which gardenes talk about how a nation should be managed. It was in Shakespeare’s Richard II. The gardeners knew more than the Queen. Making their way humbly through the gardens and courtyards of a great palace, they wondered why their monarch hadn’t take the same care of the kingdom as they did of the garden.
An under-gardener asks his master:
“Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
Keep law, and form, and due proportion,
Showing, …read more

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Every vegetable gardener knows that if you leave a small zucchini on the plant for a couple of days it will be a marrow. If you are mounting a harvest festival display, big zucchini look very impressive, but for eating, they are hopeless.
There are recipes for stuffed marrow but in my opinion life is too short to stuff any vegetable. Therefore zucchini must be picked quickly once formed. They do not freeze well, and must therefore be eaten within days.
It is true that freshly picked zucchini have a juiciness and flavor unmatched by the shop bought product, but …read more

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“How is your garden?” a friend of mine asked the other week, and in replying, I discovered that I am looking forward to winter. It will give me a chance to catch up,and perhaps we will get rain, which will change everything.
As for gardening, this week thanks to childhood illness and a sleepless night, it has been one of those times when I have barely had energy to walk down to the garden and pick a lettuce (if any had survived the heat), let alone do anything seriously horticultural. Nevertheless the vegetable garden is rewarding me to an extent that …read more

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I am not a great one for reading gardening books and magazines. In my rather bookish life, this is one area where I prefer to do rather than to read about it.
I subscribe to the more popular gardening magazines, have a soft spot for Peter Cundall, take a clutch of other magazines out of the lending library every now and again, and rather like delving into a compilation of Vita Sackville-West’s gardening columns which sits on my study bookshelf. She was much more organised than me, but then again, she had gardeners, and money.
But last week I read a gardening …read more

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Proper gardeners spend a lot of time constructing gravel paths. I don’t have the time, so some years ago when I had more space I adapted the sheet-mulching method of gardening to the making of a path. I laid lots of newspaper over short-cut grass to kill it, then simply spread the gravel over the top. A few rain showers later and the whole thing had settled enough to make quite an acceptable walking surface. It lasted a couple of seasons before I needed to weed.

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I have been reflecting recently on what we are about when we garden.
Once upon a time in England a garden was the space between the house and the countryside – an intermediary stage between the great outdoors and the world of the antimacassar; at once a tribute to nature, and evidence of human control over it. Whole generations of landscape gardeners built their careers around different ideas of mankind’s place in the natural world, and the transition from wilderness to civilisation.
George Bernard Shaw once said that the only unquestionably useful activity was gardening. Doubtless his point of view was colored …read more

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If you go to a gardening shop you will pay top dollar for trellis, but there is a cheaper and easier way. Buy weld mesh, of the type used for reinforcing in concrete. A 10×4 metre length will cost you about $30. Then hammer some star pickets into the ground or sturdy stakes, and use fencing wire to attach the mesh to the pickets. Result – instant trellis. It doesn’t look as good as the treated pine stuff from the gardening shop, but that will only matter until the plants grow to cover it.

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Our poor street trees! We live in a leafy suburb, as the real estate agents put it, but at the moment that is a sad thing. The deciduous trees are dropping their leaves although it is midsummer, because of water stress and even the native eucalypts are showing signs of stress. Several trees in the park where I walk the dog are dead, and others are dying.
This morning walking to school there were men working with secateurs to trim dangerous branches from those trees that are trying to stay alive by shedding.
Is this climate change, or natural variability? The politicians …read more

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I have firm ideas about what makes a good gardening shop, and it starts with knowledgeable staff and real gardening stuff on sale. You should be able to buy more than plants in bloom that will do for a gift on the weekend you buy them, but be dead by the following weekend.
We have taken to buying things at our local feed and produce shop. It is about as far from the gift shop type of nursery as it is possible to get. For a start, they don’t sell any plants – except dead ones, packaged for sale as animal …read more

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There doesn’t seem to be much to do in the garden except harvest. This is a silly statement because there is lots to do. Anyone who saw my garden now would wonder at the mess. The tomato plants are flopping all over the pathway because I haven’t tied them to their stakes for quite a while, and have not watered much because of the drought and the water restrictions. There are weeds right through the onion patch and the strawberry patch, and beans climbing the sweetcorn stalks.
The thing is, none of these things absolutely have to be attended to today. …read more

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