I injured Crazy Car Man on the weekend. I put him to work and made him use the evil wheelbarrow, which promptly got bogged in our rain soaked Field at the Front, causing him to jar his back. He was in so much pain I had to dress him this morning (I think he’s slightly more co-operative to dress than a toddler, but he weighs probably 10 times as much….the feet that go in the socks are so much bigger!)
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Fish Falling From the Sky
Real Estate Agents, the Fifty Dollar Cauli and Stompin’ Landlord – The Crappiest Season of the Year 2011
Crazy Car Man and I are trying to buy a house. We don’t want a big old house with loads of rooms and massive gold plated fixtures and fancy pants kitchens and bathrooms with open air bathing arenas. We have a budget, an A side of needs and B side of wants and a core list of absolute deal breakers. We find houses that meet the majority of A side, most of B side, within budget and with no deals broken and then we have to deal with the dreaded, most horrendous of all human beings in the world.
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I’m Awesome at Growing Corn
I’m not actually. I suck very very badly at growing corn. I had such high hopes when I planted the first batch of seed only to watch all 100 of them washed out of the soil by mega rain. That didn’t deter me – I live by the adage ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ – so I tried again, planting a slightly smaller batch of 60 seeds, most of which lived to grow into kind of healthy looking corn plants.
They produced those thingys at the top that hold the pollen and they produced the thingys at the bottom that have the silks. The fact that the gales kicked in and the rains smashed down just as these two thingys eventuated should have been beside the point. I assumed it was a wet and wild ride for corn mating but I also assumed the deed had been done.
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The Good, The Sad and The Freaky
I would love to be a lady of the land – in much the same way that I’d love to be the lady who ate all the pies – but in both instances I don’t think my heart could handle the strain.
Farming is for the strong and for the gamblers. Or maybe the ability to gamble comes first and the strength is merely a subsidiary skill. Either way, so much of the process is left, quite literally, in the hands of someone else. In this instance, Ma N, who we all know is going through a bit of a tanty phase. And my goodness, is she not screwing up a lot of livelihoods right now?
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The Face of Evil
Do not be fooled by the pristine whiteness of it’s plumage. This bird has a soul as black as the pits of Hades. Blacker even – as black as Hades’ pits after a hard day chopping wood. It’s purpose in life is to make me run screaming out of the house, waving my arms and shrieking like a banshee. And the little snotrag waits until I’m within whacking distance before shrieking back and then taking to the heavens on it’s pristine white wings of wrath inducement.
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2010 Round Up
2010 was an absolute corker of a year. This garden malarkey sunk it’s teeth in with a vengeance and quite suddenly I was looking at the world with new eyes. I fell off a motorbike and got married in a Lahu hilltribe ceremony, I fell off a step and discovered Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I got a new job and found a new career. And I grew loads of plants, battled snails and weeds, contended with Mother Nature’s temper tantrums, experimented madly, got things badly wrong and occasionally got them right.
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Gratuitous Sunflower Shot
Because I love them and they’re starting to look like lions!
The Sunflower Advocacy
I came home from work today feeling a little bit hot, a little bit cranky, a little bit looking forward to a glass of New Zealand’s finest grape juice for big kids – I pulled up in a cloud of dust (I don’t know why, but the little car really likes to skid to a stop) and hauled out my grown up handbag (honestly, it’s bigger than the bag I take with me when Crazy Car Man and I travel – how I can get through months on the road with my worldly possessions stuffed into a 30 litre day pack and yet feel the need to carry enough luggage for a family of five with me when I go to the office is completely beyond me). I was, to be perfectly frank, in a mood.
And then I saw this….
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Hardcore or Mad – My Pursuit of the Third Sister
You know you’re either hardcore or mad when you spend your Saturday afternoon outside in the rain planting beans. Or maybe just desperate. Desperately hardcore or madly desperate, it’s all one and the same when the third sister needs to go in.
I wrote here about turning my Field at the Front into an experimental North American Indian field of food planted in a most companionable way. The corn went in and Ma N pulled the plug out of the great bathtub in the sky resulting in the corn seed being washed out of the earth and promptly eaten by birds. I shook my fist as the sky (a futile gesture but kind of satisfying in a Scarlett O’Hara kind of way) and railed at the birds for acting in a bird-like way (totally unacceptable behaviour when it’s to my disadvantage) before sighing in resignation and buying some more seed and planting it in tubs to ensure germination.
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Renaissance Skies and a Dead Nanny Soldier
Mother Nature is a cow.
She lures you in with honeyed words and Renaissance skies and then when you’re least expecting it – when you haven’t watched the weather report on the telly or t’internet – she slams you with a good one and takes your soldiers out.
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