🌿🌒 a new entry on my journal - olive trees + moon
Hi friend,
There is a new entry on my journal, if you want to join me there! 🌸
With love from this hill,
Cat
Â
The garden in may
By cat on May 16, 2021 04:19 pm
Hooray for May, with its abundance and magic.
Summer is quickly approaching now, although I wouldn’t mind it holding on for some more weeks.
The nightingales sing all night long now, keeping me company when I need to go out during the night after too much evening tea. In the mornings, I no longer reach for a jumper. The laundry dries in a couple hours now. And the garden, well, I’ve had to water it a few times already.
There’s a sweet scent in the air when the sun rises. It’s a scent of gentle warmth and eucalyptus leaves, orange tree blooms and mint. I really can’t describe this specific scent, but it is something I associate deeply with summer, since I can remember.
The garden beds by the house are blooming and bring us so much joy - roses, snapdragons, borage, carnations, jasmine and calendula greet us every morning. These beds are the happiest of all, and I don’t know if it’s the compost-rich soil (from our compost toilet!), or the cold cups of tea emptied among the plants, or maybe just all the company we keep them with our daily comings and goings.
As for the vegetable garden, pretty much every summer crop is already developing roots in there. The cold nights are far beyond us now and everything I started from seed is nested in the dark earth.
While now I’m not sowing anything new anymore (except for some different varieties of beans, which I did early this month), here’s what I planted out during the month:
🌼 tomatoes (cherry, ox heart and something else I can’t remember)
🌼 zucchinis (some different long and dark varieties, and the small round ones)
🌼 aubergines
🌼 cucumber (restina for pickles, akito and two others I, again, can’t remember)
🌼 peppers (three different varieties)
🌼 a few varieties of pumpkins
🌼 lettuces
🌼 fennel
I think this season I’m putting into practice a small gardening lesson I’ve learnt, which is that it’s better to plant what I know will grow here and we enjoy, and do those in large quantities, instead of planting little patches (or, sometimes, single individuals) of plants to experiment with. And, like this, to end up a consistent harvest of something instead on little handfuls of plants who didn’t grow well / we didn’t have enough individuals of to select the good ones.
Maybe one day, when we have a bigger garden, we can have the space to experiment with without compromising the space we have dedicated for staple crops. So, this year, my staple crops will be tomatoes, zucchinis, runner beans, peppers and cucumbers. I know it’s not a lot of variety (and don’t even get me started on how important it is to diversify our diet in general), but I’m happy with this choice for the reasons above.
Also, what usually ends up happening, is that when someone has too much of something, they just harvest and pass it around to the neighbors… And it works both ways. We give and receive, and I hope all my plants thrive enough to harvest for us and to share within the community. By the way, this concept is really not new. The first time I had a taste of it was when we lived on our previous village on the mountains, surrounded by elders with an amazing green thumb, and everyone grew more than they needed. We were ever so often greeted with buckets full of different vegetables because everyone had too much. And that was the point. So you can be generous with thy neighbor, knowing they will be generous in return.
Happy May to all!
I’d love to know what’s growing in your gardens, and your thoughts on growing staple crops… And maybe growing too much of them. And if you are receiving this post in your mail box, know that you can always hit reply! 🌈