Spring has Springed...

Spring has sprung,

The grass has riz,

I wonder where the birdie is?

The little bird is on the wing....

No, that's absurd!

The wing is on the little bird.

Spike Milligan

You know, there's something special about gardens. That whole bringing people together thing. Sounds sappy but damn it, it's true. Without even trying, our garden already manages to foster a sense of, well... community. We aren't near any council flats, there's no magical melding of people from across the globe. Nor does the garden reach across any sort of socio-economic spectrum, we're all pretty much middle class whities with a genteel gardening addiction. Nonetheless, doing my bit at the working bee on Saturday, I couldn't help but notice a definite sense of community. It was there in the quiet conversation of myself and my fellow gardeners, it was there in the jokes we made as we worked together, pulling weeds and spreading mulch and it was there at the end of the day when we proudly swapped the veggies and flowers we'd grown in our plots.

This irresistible wave of community (and curiosity) also drew in passers-by. Two older men, one from Russia, one from Germany stopped by and chatted about gardens in Germany and a cousin with a plot in a garden in St Kilda. An old Italian man and his small white dog paused to admire my weeding. In halting but enthusiastic English the man explained that he was walking the dog for his friend who was sick and he briefly foisted the dog on me for a pat. A quiet young hipster with dark glasses and bad teeth inquired whether we had any veggies for sale and he was immediately rewarded with an armful of free produce. 

 

But, most interesting of all was the couple, about my parents' age, who stopped to chat while I was mulching the front verge. I couldn't work out if they were husband and wife or brother and sister but they explained that they'd both grown up in Brunswick, just around the corner off Albion Street. It was their first trip back in years. They'd spent the morning revisiting old haunts and had brunch at a cafe that used to be their local milk bar (A Minor Place). The area we were standing on, they explained, had been vacant, surrounded by empty land and run-down factories. 

They couldn't believe the transformation that had happened in the area and they enjoyed sharing their reminiscences as much as I enjoyed hearing them. They were blown away by the garden, I told them how it had started and about our ongoing plans for the sensory beds and the gazebo; and they promised to come back and visit in the future to watch it grow. As I handed them two heads of lettuce from my plot I realised that the garden had done it again, this time reaching across time and effortlessly bringing people together through the past and the present and the future.

Mid-winter

 It's been a long, cold, grey winter here in Melbourne but today began with one of those gorgeous mornings that makes the whole of the chilly season seem worthwhile. For some unknown reason (perhaps because I cleaned my bedroom windows last night and the light was brighter, perhaps because it's the second last day of the holidays) I was wide awake at 6am. Looking out through the clear clear glass of the window I found the world outside was waking too. To the east, the gold domes of the Russian church were glimmering against a sky of palest pink. To the west, the sky was a deep blue backdrop for the round, gold setting moon. Perfect morning for an early dog walk.

Lucy and I stepped out to find the park shivering under a layer of silver frost. It was unbelievably, cheek burningly, paw freezingly beautiful. After a run across the icy grass we skipped down to the plot to see how the veggies were faring in the frost.

Which brings me, in a round about way, to my point. It's been a long time since I've written here and the fact that I've turned into a bad blogger has been playing on my mind of late. I feel that it's only good manners to explain my long silence. Putting aside the usual "busy busy" excuses, there are two main reasons for my lack of posts. And the first, is winter.

Growing up in Queensland, where you can plant tomatoes all year round, I never much noticed the change of seasons in the veggie garden. But here in cool-temperate Melbourne there's no getting away from it.... winter in the garden is kinda dull. Compared to glorious, bountiful summer fruiting crops like tomatoes, capsicum and eggplants, winter veggies are boring to eat and boring to grow. They tend to be green and good for you and there are no fascinating flowers or fruit to follow (broccoli, kale, silverbeet) and even when they are worth eating (potatoes, carrots, beetroot) most of the action happens underground. So I've taken the opportunity, over winter, to rest my plot under a layer of lucerne mulch. I've got a few pretty little self-seeded lettuce, and more recently some candy striped beetroot but other than that there's just not alot going on to write about.

The second reason I haven't been writing is.... the other blog. At the beginning of the year I started a blog at school with my class. The kids and their parents love it (really, love it) and keeping up a regular two posts a week on the class blog leaves me with very little blogging energy to spare. If, for some reason you're at a loose end and you desperately need to know how to play "race to ten" you can check out what my class and I have been up to over here.

At the moment I'm putting together the posts with my class but I'm hoping to train them up to write their own posts. With a bit of luck I'll have them writing and publishing and I'll manage to find more energy for blogging come spring, just in time for the start of the tomato season.

Last Days of Summer

Bolting basil, meshed marigolds, storms, spent sunflowers, lettuce going to seed and more tomatoes than I know what to do with.  

 

 

 

Mantis Patrol

Several months ago, a host of tiny baby praying mantids appeared amongst the pot plants in our courtyard garden. They were a delight - a quick cup of tea in the backyard would become a Where's Wally adventure... the closer one looked, the more of the chocolate-brown babies you'd spot, hiding amongst the detail of the foliage and flowers. Over the weeks their numbers dwindled but the one or two that survived have been busy gorging all summer on pesky plant-eating insects. 

my mate the mantis

Now, all grown up and green they stalk the stems, welcome assassins. The one in the photo hangs out on the olive tree by the lounge room window, eating up unwary backyard bugs, and I'm guessing, insects attracted to our lounge room lights at night. I suspect that along with all the wet weather, the mantids are one of the reasons I haven't noticed as many caterpillars on my plants this year. It's a great partnership we have, the mantids, the plants and I. Everyone is happy, except for the Snippers, the yabbie, whose favourite food is a fat, juicy, mint-fed caterpillar, fresh from the garden.

The Strangest Thing

strange but true

At a barbecue the other day a friend asked me - what was the strangest thing growing in our community garden? At the time I said I wasn’t sure but that I’d look into it and write it up as blog post for him. Walking past after my jog the other morning I had a good look through people’s plots – I found tomatoes, basil, chives, cucumbers, corn, cornflowers, common mint, Vietnamese mint, marigolds, sunflowers, lettuce, eggplants, carrots, LOTS of zucchinis, nasturtiums and pumpkins. Someone has even planted a mini watermelon at the back of their plot, it’s adorable for sure, but I couldn’t find anything that really qualified as “strange”. And then, walking by the fruit tree bed, it struck me.... the strangest thing in our garden isn’t growing in one of the plots. It’s not even a plant. The strangest thing things in our garden, without a shadow of a doubt are... the cherry slugs!! 

Ah, cherry slugs. Even the name sends a creepy shiver of delight down my spine. And the beasties themselves certainly do not disappoint. I had no idea such wonders existed until last week when I was in the garden watering. Gav, our lovely site manager was cursing as he pulled grubs off the leaves of the cherry tree and squished them between his fingers. When he uttered the words “cherry slugs” I thought he was making it up. But a closer look soon revealed little moving blobs of greenish yellowish brown, scattered like alien snot across the upper side of the leaves on the cherry tree. There, in all their bizarre glory.... cherry slugs! Not since I saw a bott-fly larva blow me a kiss after I pulled it from the oesophagus of a dead kangaroo, have I been so transfixed with equal measures of disgust and delight. 

tiny, slimy, sluggy beastie

It turns out cherry slugs are not truly slugs. This much is kinda obvious because under their weird little sluggy bodies they have legs, much like a caterpillar (not at all like a true slug). An internet search soon revealed that they are the lovely, pesky larvae of sawfly and they feed on the upper surface of the leaves of cherry, pear, plum, apple, quince and hawthorn trees. The adult wasps (sawflies are actually little wasps) lay eggs in the leaf, from which hatch the cherry-slug larvae. After feeding on leaves, the larvae drop to the ground and dig into the soil, where they pupate. Adults emerge later and fly to the leaves to mate and lay more eggs. And so on and so on. 

But don’t let this mundane entomological description fool you. Cherry slugs are my latest reminder that when it comes the weird, wonderful, fascinating and well... just plain strange, the natural world never fails to disappoint. With their delightfully evocative name and their semi-see-through jelly-slime bodies, cherry slugs are like something from an episode of David Attenborough does Doctor Who. And yet... for all their shiny, sludgy strangeness, there they are in the garden at the bottom of my street. 

Water under the Bridge

reflections at the back of the velodrome

The Merri Corner Community Garden gets its name from the Merri Creek, which flows merrily past at the bottom of the Donald Street hill. Torrential rain overnight has done amazing things to the creek. Jogging up the eastern bank this morning was incredible – most of it was unrecognisable. I knew I’d have to take the route on the high side, I usually do after heavy rain. But even so, Lucy and I had to go cross country on numerous occasions because the water was up over the path. Well up. Lucy was pretty excited, and I have to admit, so was I. It reminded me of walking through the flooded park across the road from my parent’s house when I was a kid (on one memorable occasion I found a big freshwater turtle in the middle of a puddle).

I’ve never seen the Merri even close to as high as it was this morning, but reflecting as I jogged, I realised that four years isn’t all that long. Fortunately I ran into a friendly old Irishman walking the creek with his German shepherd. He (the Irishman, not his dog) cheerily informed me that he’d never seen the like.... and he’d lived here 15 years. Now that's more like it!

After my jog, I grabbed my phone and took a couple of quick snaps. As if the internet wasn’t already overflowing with flood pictures, here’s a couple more for your viewing pleasure.....

from the South side of the Moreland road bridge - swirly!

Moreland Road bridge, Northern side

sodden, behind the velodrome this afternoon

 

Oh, and yes never fear, the garden itself is unwashed. Thoughts are, of course, with those in other parts of the country who got flooded for real.

Art and Crafty

Chapter, the Fifth:   In which I confess my long-standing affection for seed catalogues and finally put this affection to good use.

I love Digger’s seed catalogues, I always have.  I love the gorgeous, thick,  recycled paper on which they are printed. I love their vibrant covers which change with the seasons. I love their endless collections of wondrous almost-vanished veggie varieties. I love their idiosyncratic prose, their wacky, almost-evangelical arguments for heirlooms over hybrids and I love the way they back up their case with pages and pages of beautifully photographed produce.  I’m not even a paid up Digger’s member, I just call them up every now and then and ask them to mail me a catalogue. And then I pour over it for hours, planning glorious gardens of mysterious heirloom vegetables - tiger-patterned tomatoes, tiny orange eggplants, chillies of all shapes and sizes, magical moon and stars watermelons, frilly freckled lettuces, candy-striped carrots and rainbow corn.

The problem is, I’ve never been one for growing veggies from seed. I can see how potentially rewarding it is – I just haven’t had a huge amount of success in the past. Things don’t come up. Or they do, and then I forget to water the seedlings and they dry out.  Or they take forever and I lose interest.  There are a thousand things that can go wrong between opening the seed packet and planting out the seedlings and generally at least one of them does.  I plant things from seed if I can sow them directly, otherwise I don’t bother.  

And so for me, the Digger’s catalogue has always been a bit of an empty addiction.  I read them cover to cover and leave them stacked under the coffee table – saving them for I don’t know what.  I can never bear to throw the lovely things out and so they accumulate (neatly) in the loungeroom, or as my collection has grown, slotted inconspicuously amongst the gardening magazines on the bookshelf. That was until the other day, when in a divine moment of inspiration, I finally realised just why I’d been collecting them all these years.

During my holidays I’ve been covering the daggy old cardboard book boxes from my classroom with recycled wrapping paper and finishing them off with a coat of Mod Podge. What can I say; I like my classroom to look nice.  Anyway, at some point it struck me that finally, I’d found the perfect use for my seed catalogue collection.  The thick pages are a dream to glue onto the box, no creases, no tears. They’re easy too, you can bang them on overlapping any which way and they just work. And, under a thick lacquer of Mod Podge, the multi-coloured magnificence of the veggies and flowers acquires a whole new glowing level of gorgeousness and gorgeousity.

Before and after below. Check it....

Before

After...

After.