Produce

Gardening, like cooking, helps keep me grounded - quite literally, I suppose, when playing with soil, but also in the general sense of occasional immersion in seasonality, in 'wholesomeness' and 'sustainability' (however much I might also want to interrogate those concepts), in the unexpected graces and losses of the material world.

I must confess, though, to being an irregular gardener: filled with sudden enthusiasms and grand plans that don't always happen. I'm a nomadic gardener as well, conditioned by student living in a series of rental homes to plan for portability or leaving things behind. 

In my last house, I replanted the narrow beds around the paved courtyard at the back six months before I moved out. Along the back fence was a row of lavender interspersed with rosemary, a potato vine in the corner starting to grow up a trellis left behind by a previous tenant, and in the shady left-hand side, a shrub (can't remember the name) and native violets. I wonder how it is going now?

The plants that move with me are fewer, and all have sentimental associations: a small potplant that was a gift after my first lecture, its small white flowers recalling those on the burial mounds of Rohan (I was lecturing on Tolkien); a large architectural not-palm from my sister's house, left behind as she moved across the country; a creeper with heart-shaped leaves and small white and purple flowers that colonised a herb pot when I lived in the Fremantle dreamhouse, struggling through every summer since then. 

At the moment, I'm living in my parent's house while they are away. The garden here is designed to be fairly low maintainence - my father has always had a thing for reticulation (the first $100 note I ever saw went to buy tubing), so watering isn't really an issue. But without the standard landlord-tenant worries and space to play with, I've started into vegetable gardening. My philosophy of gardening - such as it is - leans towards the organic and sustainable, which to me means either vegetables and fruit or natives. (My father would of course note that anything with carbon in counts as organic, but I'm sure you know what I mean). I have occasional dreams of a rural lot designed on permaculture principles.

The soil here is beach sand, with gum tree litter and god knows what other stuff in the side bed. The vege patch has two parts: nearer to the kitchen is the herb and regular pickings plot (basil, tarragon, rocket, cos lettuce, sage, thyme, mint, garlic chives, strawberries, a couple of leeks, bay laurel in a pot, parsley). The soil here has been built up over a few years, and the main struggle is keeping runners from the lawn from invading. (This has prompted rants on how Deleuze and Guattari must not have been gardeners). In the side bed is the second part: two beds bordered with left-over bricks. When starting the garden here I added plenty of manure, and I'm using blood and bone and pea straw mulch to keep building up the soil. The compost bin lives here as well, protected by the fence and dug into the ground by over thirty centimetres. Leaving the compost bin outside the fence resulted in open pit mining by the puppy dog to get at the ebticing mouldy kitchen scraps. The now fortified patch has been christened 'stalag 13', with the dog as head of the escape committee. (In the early stages of fortification he burrowed in, then spent the night howling, trapped inside because he couldn't figure out how to leave through the hole he came through!) This is where I'm trying to grow pumpkins, eggplants, leeks, garlic, more cos lettuce, spinach and carrots. I have some broccoli seedlings in a seed raising tray that need to be planted out this weekend.

 
While these small patches are nowhere near enough to keep the household fed, I like them for the small differences they make: greenery is a spot that was empty before, some fresh basil in my bruscetta, time away from the computer screen with some small alteration in the world to show for it. And gardening, like the plants that move with me, can be a way of tending to emotional ties - comparing crops over the phone with my mother, being given recipies - and more jam jars than I could ever need - by my grandfather, noting the opposing transitions between seasons when talking to friends overseas. It is productive, I suppose, in ways that go beyond produce.