Did you have fun at childrens’ church, Jo?
Yes, but I missed story time. But that doesn’t matter because it was Jonah and the whale.
And you know that one, right?
Yes, and it’s a bit boring.
Well, next week it’ll probably be one you don’t know.
Like what one, Daddy?
Well, like Isaiah and the octopus (MGW and I dissolve into fits of giggles).
What’s that one about, Dad?
You’ll have to wait and see love.
🙂
Emily stood up in her cot and our dear, sweet, Josie said “Ag, man.”
The downturn’s not bitten too hard here yet (witness the prime lending rate sitting at 14% – down, but not down) and work’s still ticking over at an almost civilised pace. Nonetheless, discretion being the better part of valour, MGW and I have planted a vege garden.
Everyone knows that the true sign of recession is the scarcity of high quality organic vegetables and we’re not going to be caught out by that one. Oh no. Well, maybe … we’ve only actually had a pak choi and seven strawberries so far, so technically we haven’t yet avoided the queues at the local organic market. Or any market.
Now when you read “vege garden” I’m willing to bet that the image that pops into your mind unbidden is nothing.at.all like our reality. You’re seeing a nice little patch of tilled earth; neat rows of leafy things, some carrots, some lettuces, maybe a row of trellis for peas. Let me disabuse you.
There are, as one ventures into market gardening, a great many questions to be answered: what to plant? where to plant? how to fertilise? when to water? from whence the water? So many questions, in fact, that actually getting started turned out to be rather difficult. Finally, in desparation, we went out to a nursery and bought one of everything they had. First question answered.
When one has a couple of barrow-loads of seedlings entirely dependent on one for their wellbeing one begins to feel a certain obligation to think about how such care might be accomplished. On reflection we decided that we probably lack the constitution required for regular weeding, for digging, for unnecessarily repetitive bending-at-the-waist and for heavy lifting so we acquired a trolley-load of plastic buckets, drilled holes in them, filled them with Kirstenbosch compost and put them on trestles in a weed-free mostly-sterile courtyard.
We’ve designed a very-cool-almost-automatic-grey-water-recycling crop watering system but haven’t quite implemented yet, so still have the rather dull chore of watering buckets of veg twice daily. Which reminds me, it’s been hellish hot (for Cape Town) the last couple of weeks. Just a shade under 40 degrees quite often.
When raising veg in buckets (with holes) in 40 degree heat, nutrition becomes a problem. For the plants. The colour of the water draining from the buckets gets clearer day by day as the nutrient value of the soil is diluted and rinsed away. The popular answer to this problem is worms. A little piece of worm heaven in a nice cozy warm barrel where vegetable scraps from the kitchen rain down on a regular basis as if by magic. Strategic holes in the barrel allow worm excreta to drain out into a bucket for application to the veges. Problem solved. Or so the theory goes.
I’m not sure our vege garden is cost effective.
I imagine myself sitting quietly somewhere, reading …
I like lime season. MGW reckons lime season is why I haven’t come down with the lurgy that’s doing the rounds. All that good ol’ natural vitamin C.
Actually, she maintains it has more to do with the way I dilute the freshly-squeezed lime juice. Gin, vodka, tequila-with-a-splash-of-cointreau … . She may be right.
Either way lime season is way too short.
“Dad, do you know, when all my teeth have fallen out I’ll get to choose my very own soup!“
The ol’ blog needed refreshing – the autumn trees on Old London Road were pretty, but we haven’t actually seen them for a while now.
The new masthead uses a shot of the sunset from Storms River Mouth just a few days before the end of 2008, Jo and Sophie asleep in a cabin on holiday and Emily eating a rice cake. Voraciously.
“Dreamy” is a word with quite distinct meanings on either side of the Atlantic. I like them both.
If you’re still seeing blue background and/or trees and sunglasses hit ctrl-refresh. Perhaps a few times.
I’ve trimmed links to dead (or, in some cases, barely alive) blogs from the list. No offense intended …
It’s end-of-summer hayfever time and Sophie is rotten with it. Jo has occasional sneezes and a light fever. Emily’s snotty and Michelle and I are sleep-deprived. It’s been two years since Sophie’s Big Seizure – hayfever and tonsilitis conspiring to trigger a fit to remember. So now we do our utmost to help her avoid ear infections, throat infections, … any infections; something the blooming hayfever season makes difficult.
Which brings me to the television thing. We don’t get out much when the chidlers are rotten. We stay in. So that they get better, dammit. That means a constant, repetitive shuttle from the toy room with lego-and-puzzles-and-tracks-and-towns-and-scooters-and-books to the lounge with a massive. obscenely massive. collection of kids DVDs. The timing of the shuttle is governed at one end by the pitch of screaming and at the other by, well, the producer’s whim. Or the studio’s budget.
It would have been nice to get into the pool today. It’s 31 degrees just now (88 for those of you celsius-challenged trans-Atlantic-people). Inside. It’s 17.10 and was hotter earlier and we couldn’t get in the pool because we know that’ll delay everyones’ recovery. Luverly.
It’ll be winter soon. I like winter.
Those days when life was better, the sun shone brighter and we had more fun.
Josie watches this morning’s partial eclipse of the sun projected through a pinhole.