Gardening by stages

I've stopped being cold all the time, I suspect because the weather got warmer. However I have been eating more animal too. Hard to say what's done it; I'm not a very controlled environment. Pretty damn pleased though. Yesterday I was in a sundress all day while normal people were wearing lots of clothes, which is the way I like it.

Just spent two hours fixing up the garden. I think two hours a day is going to have to be my maximum, more or less. Any more and I seem to get tired of it, and shirk the next day. Like running and eating I suppose - always stop just before you want to. We have some mustard greens and beets in - the beets for the greens as well - some tomatos, some red pepper, and some chives and strawberries out fron where it's less sunny. Herbs too. The coriander is doing well, although the F-word stepped on one of the plants today so I'm just hoping it bounces back. The other herbs I planted in a spot that's not sunny enough, so they're surviving, but grudgingly.

In the meantime, the citrus grove keeps freaking out - the clementine and mandarin tree fruiting faster than we can give them away, and certainly faster than we can eat them. We're keeping on top of the lemons, and the poor little lime tree out back that tomorrow I'm going to have to help out, in terms of getting her some sun. The oranges are about to overwhelm us, God willing. And then there's this fantastic tree that as far as I can tell is only grown in Australian and New Zealand - the 'lemonade' tree. It's a cross between a lemon and a clementine, and fuck me is it good. The fruits - abundant - taste like a sweetened lemon. Really beautiful.

The world is biggish

I wish the world was smaller. Then gravity would be less strong, so not only would everything be closer, but we could jump there. Money makes the world a hell of a lot smaller. It's nice to have enough money that I can buy my ticket to Canada without making a dent in the budget. It's nice that my company has a good enough cashflow that I can traipse off to China and India and whatnot. And it's nice the Australian government has enough money that I'm allowed to write off all my plane tickets. But I do wish everything was closer. When we make babies, everything is gonna change, in terms of money, in terms of distance . . .

I still don't feel attached to Australia but fuck me do I feel attached to my garden. I'll miss it so much if we ever leave. And who knows how I'll feel about things in a few years.

Our neighbours are ladies in their nineties who have been in their homes for 50 plus years. I haven't been anything for 50 plus years. Though I guess half of me already potentially existed in my mum's ovaries, jockeying for position with all of her other eggs, including half of my three brothers. Once, we were legion; now, we are four. God, that's fucking weird. Her ovaries are gone now. Not just post-menopausal gone, but actually taken out and, I assume, incinerated. How the fuck did me and my awesome brothers manage to get born? Not only among the legions of eggs, but the legions and legions of short-lived little men fighting to get out of testicles and into the right place?

It's easier for me to have religious faith than to process how utterly random it is that I and the people I love exist. In fact I think I may have made a religion out of randomness since getting kicked out of church.

I'm not high. But it'd be nice.

Gardening, disquietly

I am going apeshit on the garden's ass. We are all moved in to our new house and any trepidations I had about being a homeowner and in hock to the bank went up in smoke as soon as I started weeding. As a special bonus, we have a citrus grove here in full fruit. Luckily the colony of fruit bats next door have serious sugar teeth - they like mangoes, longans, shit like that - not the acidic fruit - so we are fucking drowning in mandarins here. I'm making marmelade today and keeping a big punchbowl of iced tea with a bunch of them sliced up in there, which adds a class to the household I never expected to have. And there are oranges, lemons, and limes. It's great.

We're getting chickens in later this week. Food is so fucking expensive in Australia that it's key we make us much as we can in our garden, which is 1200 square meters and fertile . . .

Reading Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. It is a little whiny and describes a mindset that I shook off after psychoanalysis a few years ago, but I'm enjoying it, and thinking of ordering the Portuguese original for the poetry of it. With my Italian and the English version next to me I can probably blunder through it - written Portuguese is reasonably easy to understand, certainly compared to spoken Portuguese. It is having the brutal effect, though, of making me miss Lisbon so much I could cry. Pessoa seemed like a pretty miserable fuck but his love of Lisbon is obvious in every chapter of the book. I love Lisbon too.

As much fun as I'm having in the garden, and running, and chatting with all our nice friends who I can't help but feel are comparing themselves with us, and who we are comparing ourselves with, in ways I was never aware of before and that I'm not comfortable with though it feels very natural - despite all that, I feel about a million miles away from everything that matters. When you're a ten hour flight even from Singapore - farther from Singapore than I was from my family when we lived in Europe - shit, we are far away from everything. From everyone I love besides the F-word, and from character. Melbourne is a fine city and Australians will tell you it's an oasis of culture, but Melbourne is fucking vulgar and rich, almost as vulgar and rich as New York, which is not a problem in and of itself but the more vulgar and rich a city is the less special is its character.

I may have already pointed out before that I'm happy here in a way I haven't been before - it's such a physically vital place, and now we have a house, and a mammoth garden, and fucking mandarins coming out of our ears. That's still true. That's also a condition of my job, which could change anytime, and then how will I feel about this place if I already start sniffling every time I remember something I'd half-forgotten about Lisbon, or Berlin, or all the other poor and unvulgar cities I love? I don't know. All this is so uncertain. Sigh.

The long pigs forage

There's a special joy in foraging. You mushroomers know it. And I'm going to forage the fuck out of Europe until we leave, it's one of my resolutions. Last weekend in Neuss, for example, we foraged for chestnuts, and then when I went out for my morning constitutional yesterday, they were just lying there in the Dudenpark. And it turns out harvesting those fuckers is irresistible. All you do is step on them and they pop out of their horridly spiky casings and there they all, all shiny and begging to be picked up. And for whatever reason, there's a bumper crop this year, so there are great crowds of people pawing and foraging away all over the place. It reminds me, in a rather nice way, how like pigs we are as a species, pawing and foraging away. But those poor fuckers have to use their faces to pick up food, and we have opposable thumbs.

I wonder where we deviated from pigs on the tree of life, considering we have so many of the same eating habits and we can use their organs and apparently we taste just like they do. That never seems be something writers on evolution point out. I wish they would, it's shit like this I want to know, not having it be proved for the umpteenth time that birds are actually dinosaurs. I fucking know that already. Just listen to these fucking birds and tell me they don't sound like fucking dinosaurs:



It's very pretty though.

Less foragey and still foody is the balcony garden. On Monday the remains of all but two of the cucumbers came out with a few mini-ones for the salad that night; yesterday, I ripped up one finished tomato plant and the peas, which were finished ages ago of course, but whose skeletons one of the cucumber plant had been using for support (it's so fucking frustrating to have so little space, but patience, Spliffe, patience, your back garden will come). The rest of the tomato plants are still going fairly strong; up until this weekend we'd been having an unseasonably warm and sunny fall so they're actually peaking just now - don't know if they can pull through without a frost though. The pepper plants are going gangbusters but I don't think the F-word gave them enough container room so I don't know how they'll wind up.

Small sense of panic . . . when the plants are all finished, we have to tape the balcony back up for the winter to keep out the brutal Art Nouveau drafts. Fuck, I hate winter. Oh well, I'll find a way to enjoy it. Next year, baby - sub-tropics.

Eating the balcony

Feeling better, on the mend-ish. Still pretty gross but enjoying staying in my pyjamas all day. Someday life will be like this, and not just when I've got a fucking pandemic.

Not much other news that's fit to print today, so a garden update. My aloe pups, apparently while I've been in Canada, have taken off and look quite good. Christmas presents! Yay! The tomatilloes have also finally taken off too, at least somewhat, on their second flowering; we have five or six fruit on the go. And the capsicum are fruiting too. The lemon cucumbers have done very well, and are still producing; I've lost count of what we've got off them. Not enough for pickling, though - just stuffing in our faces right off the vine. The peas have been and gone, really minimally, but Daddy had warned us not to expect anything out of peas in containers, so I'm not upset.

The tomatoes have been the biggest disappointment so far - no potash and they've mostly got rot spots. Well, we won't make that mistake again. They're still fruiting. We'll see how gentle the autumn is and what we can get out of it - but it's all experimental at this point, in anticipation of life with a fucking garden, man. In Australia we'll have a constant growing season and will actually be able to feed ourselves a fair go - like when I was a child. I want to be ready. I feel ready. It's hard to wait, in fact.

In the meantime, I haven't quite made up my mind if next summer we'll garden again or if I'll have a go at raising some dragon trees for private sale in the nicer pots. A bit of column A and a bit of column B, I think.

I'll sing down that cucumber, baby

The lemon cucumber plant has been putting a lot out there. I'm not sure why I planted lemon cucumber instead of a normal kind, I think I'd been given to understand that they take up less room. But they're taking up a fuckload of room, and it's been a struggle to keep them from overwhelming the tomatoes; the fuckers grow so fast. They're growing only slightly less fast now as they fruit, and we ate the first one yesterday. Fucking awesome. It might be because it was fresh off the vine but it was way better than any of the cucumber varieties I've ever bought, and I'll even daresay better than the standard big green cukes Dad drew in the back garden, which were seedier. These lemon cucumbers are real fleshy motherfuckers, and picked young, not too seedy - just a lovely tennis-ball sized lump of cucumber flesh with a slightly richer taste than the long green ones.

(Incidentally, Paul Theroux wrote in the Pillars of Hercules that in Turkey, the word 'cucumber' has become inextricably linked to its idiomatic meaning, penis, in a way that makes me think of our word 'cock' - people avoid saying it in its literal meaning because it's so very suggestive. While we have some synonyms to choose from, like rooster or chanticleer, because heaven knows I fall all over myself to say 'chanticleer' when cock will do, in Turkey they'll make allusive references instead, like 'green salad things.' And when there's a fake bomb scare, the defusers will often open the suspicious package and find a cucumer with a note pinned to it: "This is what you are." I wonder if that's true, I can't find it on the Internets.)

Anyways, feeling quite smug about how yummy the lemon cucumbers are because apparently they need to be eaten fresh off the vine, going soggy and gross three days after picking, which is why they aren't commercially grown and sold, I've heard from somewhere. And we have a supply on our back balcony. Sweet. I always wonder about unsellable foods like that. I've heard there are a kajillion banana varieties, for example, most of them inexpressibly delicious, and we just get the one we get because it's the only one that tolerates being picked green, transported, and sold weeks and weeks after harvesting - I've heard pawpaw is fucking amazing, for example, and grows in temperate climates - even up close to where I was living in Toronto - but that it goes off so fast no one sells it. Someday I will have a big big garden and eat like a queen . . . but at the moment I'm thrilled with the one lemon cucumber we ate yesterday.

Generally speaking the back balcony garden is going stupendously, though I don't want to count my tomatoes and cucumbers before they're plucked. It's sheltered from the wind but gets quite good sunlight, as good as you can get in this fucking wet pig of a country, so I should count my blessings. But Croatia went a fair way to making me sicker of this place than I already was.

The Complainant Gardener

Another short one today as the weather continues to buck my negative expectations and made irresistible sitting on the salvaged bench on our balcony, surrounded by flourishing tomato, cucumber, pea and lots of other plants, including some from our upstairs neighbour. I'm taking care of her balcony while she's away but she asked me to bring these two to my own balcony, because they're perennials that will flower while she's gone, and she didn't want them to go to waste. I love Germans.

It's a pity my camera cable is still lost because this morning I found the first tomato (or it could be tomatillo, I don't know) flower turning into fruit - a little green lump of swelling fertility - and I have a powerful urge to share it with the world, which I'm sure will manage to keep turning even without a blow-by-blow photo account of My Second Garden* . I'm starting to understand my family's men and their garden-feelings - and the Italians and the English were equally enthusiastic. When I'm sitting on my balcony surrounded by things that are flourishing in my care, I feel as smug, proud, and happy as if I'd just invented photosynthesis.

Oh, you know what I was writing yesterday about the other shoe dropping? It dropped. The ABC stopped streaming The Chasers War on Everything outside of Australia. I guess the big flap over the dying children sketch gave them that little bit of publicity that had too many furrrrrriners tuning in and, I don't know, but I'm pissed off.

*My first was a 2mx2m patch in my father's massive garden in the house where I did most of my growing up - but I only grew root vegetables there. I was four, for fuck's sake. Man, would I ever love to have a 2mx2m patch now. But space is such a different concept in Europe, which is no doubt a huge part of why I've started to feel it's time to leave.