The Garden Bug

Hopefully today's hard labour has sweated the bug out of me.

It's all C's fault.  He asked me to look after his herb garden while he was in Europe for five weeks, and I got rather involved.  I even named the sunflowers.  (Jo and Penelope, since you asked.)

I even weeded the garden for him while he was gone.  Twice.

<--- In this picture you can see Jo in the background, looking very mournful next to half of Penelope.  See, when C got home from Europe, he massacred Penelope, something which I find very hard to understand.

I don't like flowers very much, and I especially don't like picking them and bringing them into the house - but Jo and Penelope were beautiful, and tall, and I liked to sit on the couch (inside, in the AC) and watch them - through the screen door - waving around in the breeze.

Unfortunately, C likes flowers to be in the AC with him.  As does his girlfriend.  So he slaughtered poor Penelope and sent her head as some sort of trophy down south to his girlfriend's parents' house.

And I became enraged.

I knew it was going to happen, though.  I knew that their days were numbered - to the extent to dreading the end of the Europe trip.  I took photos of Jo and Penelope, and I posted them on Facebook for all the world to see.  And I was relieved to return from Singapore to find that Jo still stood, although deeply saddened by Penelope's demise.

Penelope (right)

And I became enraged.  Enraged to the extent that I considered having a garden of my own.  A garden that nobody would dare touch the sunflowers, and I would have a whole row of them from one end of the house to the other, and they would put C's garden to shame.  We're talking about me having a garden.  Me, the I-hate-all-flowers-with-a-great-and-terrible-hatred person.

Sunflowers are different.

<--- So this is how I spent yesterday.  Me, and initially a trowel, and then C came home and commented that he had a spade, and it went much more quickly after that.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of clay in the soil, about four to eight inches below the surface.  This made digging a little more challenging.  I decided that my goal of sunflowers from one end of the garden to the other was probably slightly overenthusiastic, and stopped after about two and a half metres.

Today, I went to Bunnings and got two sacks of compost and...

a packet of sunflower seeds
a packet of carrot seeds
six tomato plants
four courgette plants

In my defence, I only wanted two tomato plants but they came in trays of six, and yes okay I didn't want courgettes at all but they looked so sweet I couldn't resist them...

I then decided that my garden was too narrow, and dug it out another eight inches or so, until almost as wide as C's patch.  Kurt wanted me to make it equal so that it looked better, but I wanted to be different...  I then started planting.

<--- In the foreground three tomato plants - supposed to be fifty centimetres apart (the two at the back are, and the one at the front is slightly closer).  Then two courgette plants - the instructions said seventy-five centimetres apart, so I gave them lots of space either end, and then planted them about twenty centimetres apart, to grow into one massive plant - hopefully.

The far end has four sunflowers in a row at the back, twenty centimetres apart, and a row of carrots at the front, one metre wide.

And then I ran out of space, so the last three tomato plants and one courgette (one died) are in a clay pot waiting to be put somewhere.

Kurt might take a tomato and a courgette plant for his new apartment, and I have offered the final two tomato plants to C's girlfriend... but they may just end up dying, poor things.

So after all my thoughts of sunflowers from end to end of the garden, I have ended up planting four, because of the tastiness of tomatoes and courgette, but hopefully those four will grow big and strong and put Jo and Penelope to shame !

TTFN !