We've been putting together no- dig vegetable gardens for the last couple of months and sowing seeds for spring and summer. This is part of our (Alex's and my) attempt to become more sustainable and also a strategy for stress relief as we use gardening as a form of communication with nature and meditation for the soul (necessary in semi-city/suburban life). We are planting a variety of edibles that we commonly buy-
leaf vegetables incl. lettuces, spinach's, silverbeets, cabbages
tomatoes of many varieties
herbs such as mint, parsley, sage, thyme, rosemary, chives and basil
peas and beans incl. an experiment with soy beans
onions and some garlic
We are also dabbling with magical herbs for teas, skin treatment and flavourings such as Valerian, calendula, chamomile, nasturtium, coneflowers/echinacea, astragalus, catnip, mugwort and hyssop. This is for what we will call, our pharmaceutical garden.
We're also propagating "weeds" and special plants that improve the soil and can also be eaten for their high nutrient content such as nettles (for nettle tea), dandelion (eat the leaves and make tea and returns nutrients to the soil), chickweed and native warrigal greens.
We have two beds (thanks to our landlords who are allowing us use of two disused gardens in their front yard) and a lot of pots, polytrays salvaged from street dumping and containers in our part of the yard.
Today, as we prepared the second bed, G (kindy aged boy) and O (his littler sister) emerged with their parents P and T (who are also our landlords and live in the house our granny flat is attached to) for a family working bee cutting the grass and trimming the edges. We hijacked the kiddies, in perfect gardening attire of gumboots and bucket hats and watering cans in hand, to help us put the garden together and show them what we were doing.
They demanded "more, more" even after we had planted all the seeds allocated for that day and watered all the layers in the second no dig. This is funny, Alex and I often look at the garden together proclaiming "more plants! more plants!" O wanted to know WHY, we were planting seeds and told me she "wuved begetables" especially pumpkin and potato. I told her hopefully we'll plant some potato in some hessian sacks sometime but there was no room for pumpkin in our garden! G said he hated peas when he was a baby but loved them now, which is lucky because we have the whole back fence ready for climbing peas and beans. He said that if anyone stepped on the baby plants, we should "smack them!" but I don't think it'll come to that.
After resorting to forcing them to leave because we simply had no jobs left for them late in the aftermoon, everything was very well watered in all sectors of the garden, all seeds sowed and the bed polished with pea straw was ready to sit a while before being planted into, they asked if they could come back next week and help us. O's favourite things to say "can i help wu? pwease?" and "come on, a widdle more, a widdle more" dwindling as she is shuffled back into her house and G, who is very manly for a kindy boy, already lamenting the time Alex picked him up so he could reach to water the back of the garden and how strong both he and Alex are.
What perfect and entertaining garden hands!
