My camera is pretty good, but it sucks severely at certain jobs. It’s a Sony Cybershot point and shoot digital piece of wonderment that my folks gave me about six years ago. It takes a great photo for an amateur camera – all the photos on my blog (unless otherwise credited) are taken with my Sony, and being the luddite that I am, there’s no tweaking or airbrushing – partly because I don’t know how to do it, and partly because I can’t be bothered. The camera has traveled through 21 countries with me and the Man and has never put a foot wrong.
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Crazy Car Mon-et?
The Great Winter Tomato Hoax
There is nothing better than a cheese and tomato sandwich, on really fresh bread, with salt and pepper. Even just writing about it makes me crave one.
Crazy Car Man doesn’t agree. In his opinion, until very very recently, the only thing a tomato was good for was making tomato sauce. And he has a point – in the shops, tomatoes are crap. In fact, in his opinion, tomatoes come in a close second to his most hated fruit, known as The Fruit of the Devil (seriously, he says it in capital letters), the dreaded pineapple.
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1.52pm
Saturday morning was so hot I pulled the gardening shorts on for the first time since May. I sent up a warning flare first so people in the vicinity could put their sunglasses on before looking at the legs directly – it is akin to looking at the sun, the glare will leave leg shaped black spots before your eyes for days afterward.
The shorts and I zoomed up to the nursery to buy some potting mix, as some of the tomato seedlings are requesting an upgrade to business class, and on the way there I spotted the cloud.
It was black. It was roiling. It was moving in fast. It looked angry and like it might have some hail to throw on my cars and my garden. The nursery folk were outside pulling the lettuce seedlings undercover, always a bad sign, so I threw some money on the counter and a couple of bags of potting mix into the boot and headed home like the hounds of hell were on my heels.
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You Couldn’t Make It Up
These are the search words someone used to find my site.
I laughed really hard and then tried it myself. Sure enough, I’m first and second in the listing. Who knew?
I’m the Kylie Minogue for transgender gardeners!
I hope I age as well as her.
Question for the Collective: Deadheading
What I know about growing flowers could fill half a thimble, and that’s being generous….in all honesty, it’s probably more like the drops that are left in the bottom of a thimble when you fill it up with water and then pour it out, give it a good shake and then set it upright again.
Not much.
And so I call on the wisdom of the cyberverse, and all you legends who pop into Crazy Garden Ladyland on occasion, for advice on what to do with my flowers.
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When The Wind Blows
I woke up this morning in the most horrible temper. I’d been kept awake most of the night by the howling of the wind, which put me firmly on the wrong side when I swung myself out of bed.
I hate the wind. A frisky breeze can be a most pleasant thing, but when it goes from fluttering the tendrils of my hair to blinding me with said hair and bombarding my blind self with the howling of a thousand ghouls, it’s no longer a pleasant experience and is more akin to fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard.
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My Showgirls Live On
I described my sundews as the showgirls of the plant world, and I still stand by that description. Like all good performers they retire and then have a comeback to beat all comebacks.
I wrote in July that I thought I’d maybe lost them, but it turns out they were in their first retirement, and after a wee beauty rest over winter they’re looking fabulous once again, and have been bugging me (boom tish) to get their photos online so the world at large can admire them. They’re so vain, all I can do is tsk and shake my head, and then indulge them in their quest for compliments.
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Nightmare Bloom
I’m having nightmares after seeing this plant. I think it looks like it would take a chunk out of you as you walk past.
I’m getting strong visuals of some unsuspecting person leaning in to smell it, and losing their nose.
Boss of the Weeds
I have a love/hate relationship with weeds. I find some of them absolutely fascinating, and quite frankly, any plant that has the audacity and strength of will to grow out of a crack in the footpath really deserves a round of applause. And some of them are quite lovely. To my eye, there is nothing more free and beautiful than a wild meadow full of flowers and grasses undulating in the breeze. I see great beauty, and others see a field of evil.
I have a book on weeds that I picked up at our local Salvos for $3. It’s a bit dry as I think it was designed to be a text for agricultural students, and the authors are quite dismissive of the average joe gardener.
“To the home gardener, any plants which volunteer between his neat rows of vegetables or around the bases of his standard roses are weeds” *
Messieurs Lamp and Collet obviously believe the home gardener is an obsessive pedant fixated on one particular type of flora, which the weed boys, naturally, are not.
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In Case You Needed More Proof…..
Whilst in Bedouin Town, Mrs Bedouin showed me that kitsch isn’t solely the domain of seaside retirement towns and my side garden. The country has it too. I can feel a travel slash garden ornament coffee table book trying to be born. It hurts.
A country cousin of my wheelbarrow was in situ behind the local cafe (coffeeshop, let’s not be having any of that foreign lingo). I gloated inwardly at first at how beautiful mine was in comparison until I realised that the lovely owner of this one is gardening in a semi-arid region, her tank water is for all aspects of life (if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down) and not just for the garden, and she was quite possibly old enough for the barrow to have been her’s as a girl, and wasn’t something picked up at the local antique shop because it had charm.
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