It's a long way from a white Christmas

We woke to snow falling on our Canberra garden this morning. Snow - in Australia! It's not what you expect. It's certainly not what I emigrated from Scotland in search of. I ought not to be too surprised though. We live about ninety-minutes' drive from the Snowy Mountains and, I suppose, the clue is in the their title. 

Spike, of course, was happier than a penguin at the south pole. Not only was it cold (minus two last night and minus four expected tonight), not only was the ground frosted hard, it was actually snowing as we looked out of our window. Wrapped only in her dressing gown Spike went to investigate, to willingly experience the cold (I guess) and take the photograph of our garage roof (which could pass for a ploughed field on a crisp northern morning from my childhood). 

While our intrepid photographer was out capturing her shot I was switching on the fire in our study because ... you know ... it was snowing outside. I ask you, does that seem odd to you?

Spike's spuds

Picked this morning

Before ...

and after.

Back to the future

Sitting in the shade of the house this morning there came a moment of epiphany. It was hot. The late summer sun - following on from what record-keepers report today is the hottest February recorded in more the seventy years - the front garden looked stressed  That's not helped, of course by the poor soil here in Canberra.

Spike stood opposite me, across the garden, beneath the shade of the trees at the roadside. It was pleasant over there, she said. And that's when epiphany struck. A lawn. Give up the almost certainly doomed attempts to cultivate vegetables in the meagre soil under a burning sun. Grow some sort of hardy grass with underground watering of some description. We can grow vegetables in large terracotta pots (as our wildly enthusiastic tomato plant is proving ... I know, I know ... a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable but you get my point). We shall redirect lost water from the roof to the pots, the apple tree that'll be going in and the grass.

Spike and Thistle-the-cat will have a shaded spot to sit or lounge or sleep in summer. We'll have grass. How retro. Who knew?

Houston ... we have a Triffid

When we bought the house three years ago there was an old wheelbarrow strategically positioned in an empty spot of the front garden. It contained a bed of small, uninteresting succulents barely reaching the top of the barrow sides. The plants have grown quite a bit in the intervening years and are now in danger of becoming quite interesting indeed. 

About three weeks ago they all began to look bigger, broader, more ... more ... succulent. And in the last fortnight or so, through days when the temperature regularly reached 30 degrees plus and almost touched 40 degrees a few times, despite several ferocious thunder storms and in the face of two wild hail storms, one of the succulents has shot up - straight into the air, heading towards half a metre.  It reminds me of the fictional Triffids.  Who knows what it will do next?

Summer in Australia ...... a winter wonderland?????

Not quite a polar vortex ...

... but enough to trouble a plaster-cast wombat
and his friends - the teapots.

We had temperatures in the high-thirties last week - 38 and 39 degrees, a total fire-ban and plants in dire need of rain.  This evening, as we arrived home from shopping, this lot and much, much more fell in two minutes.

At the end of a hot, frustrating day in a kiln room ...

... the need to prune a rioting bush is irresistable

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad

Delusional man looks at tomatoes today

So I submitted my resignation this morning. I have no new job to go to. I'm returning to full time study at the Australian National University, hope to pick up bits and pieces of work where I can and use the comparatively meagre resources I have to support us. I think I can eke out two years. I'll either succeed with this bonkers plan or fail spectacularly. There is no Plan B but I intend to succeed.

In advance of the university year beginning next month I enrolled in a free, online course provided by the Open University. It's called Start Writing Fiction and encourages you to do what it says on the label. The course started today. 

One of the early exercises goes like this:

Write a paragraph (50 to 100 words) containing one fact and three fictitious elements. 

You can write about yourself, about your interests, about history – about anything you like. Then try the reverse – write a paragraph containing three facts and one fictitious element.

And this is how I responded (based on some previous attempts);

One fact, three fictitious elements 

There are lies, damned lies and - of course - there are statistics.  Everyone knows, statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be crushed to death by a vending machine tipping over than to be taken by a shark.  Except that out here, an hour east of the Whitsunday Islands, there are no vending machines of any shape, size or form.  Not one.  But I’ll bet my last soggy dollar there are more than enough sharks to go round.  Not far from here.  And this yacht is sinking.  I reckon we have an hour. 

Three facts, one fictitious element 

Four miles south-west of the Clachan Bridge, which some folk call the Bridge over the Atlantic, a five-minute ferry crossing takes you from the pier at Ellenabeich village to the island of Easdale.  It was there, on that slate outcrop, my mother gave birth at the height of the great storm in the winter of 1881.  As I entered the world, shrieking like a hungry herring gull, a monstrous wall of wild water breached the island’s sea defences, flooding the quarries.  Nothing thereafter could ever be the same.

I'm started.  As I hope to continue.  Writing.

Spike's first pear

Wake up and smell Spike's tulips, Douglas

I have not been at my best since Tuesday evening.  Today, however, I crossed the threshold into a world in which spring announces its arrival.  And so I tweeted because I've become a man who tweets his news.  Who knows why?  

4 days confined to bed are OVER!!! #WakeUpAndSmellTheTulips Don't you just love being a Quad.? (That'll be a no) pic.twitter.com/Um1YaZj5ZY

— Dougie Herd (@dougie_herd) September 26, 2015

First essay in

Spike's Daffodils

Okay, it's not quite a host of golden daffodils but it's evidence enough of spring's arrival here in the nation's capital.  Me and the cat are enjoying a quiet, suburban morning together basking in the balmy heat of the sun in a cloudless sky - all nine degrees but it feels like a Scottish summer's day already.

I wrote about the daffodils - Wordsworth's rather than Spike's - as part of my essay submitted digitally last night. Digital submissions ... who knew?  Gone, it would seem, is the caffeine-fuelled, all-nighter of the 1970s, culminating in the dash across the campus to the English department, the frantic search for a pen that worked to complete the essay cover sheet before slipping it through the gaping mouth at the top of the submission box fixed to the external wall of the departmental office. Five minutes before the deadline expires, a great weight lifts from your shoulders and you think, time for a celebratory beer or three. I wonder who'll be in the bar, like me, bragging about how close we got to that box being shut.

That was then and this is now.  Last night? Check the bibliography, run Microsoft's spelling checker, upload the file ... hit send.

And how does one celebrate?

With a mug of tea and an episode of season four of The Walking Dead.  Avert your delicate gaze Douglas as you not-quite-watch our raggle-taggle band of survivalist heroes at the very limits of their existential tethers finding even more novel ways to stab, smash, crush, squash, slice, dice and decapitate an almost limitless supply of zombies.

That could almost be a metaphor for the intellectual processes of preparing 2,800 words on 18th Century Romantic poets and the gendered pursuit of the sublime.  Or not.  

It's done and in.  Just not like the old days.

Thank goodness.

Cold in any currency

Leaf mulch, plastic bottles and a good deal of hope

First day of winter and there was frost on the ground, snow on the southern uplands and, I read in today's newspaper, snow on the streets of Braidwood where Spike and I spent Saturday.  The weather forecast tells us the temperature will drop to minus three degrees overnight, which is cold in anybody's language.  

Spike has been out in the garden, cutting the bottoms off empty bottles of sparkling water to use as mini-greenhouses to protect the sweet pea seedlings planted not so long ago in preparation for the return of warm weather and all that comes with spring.  Here's hoping the plastic bottles are up to the week ahead.

Preparing for spring

Spike's tools on a sunny day for planting garlic & tulip bulbs then hacking down a dead bush

The season of mist and mellow fruitfulness ... Keats tells us.

Choosing is a serious business: Pic by Spike

After a couple of cold, rainy days, just to make the point that summer is long gone, the sun has returned.  As soon as it did I was out there, in the garden, soaking-in the autumnal glow, basking in it like a retired lumberjack in my stylish -  euphemism for cheap - flannelet shirt. Spike captured the moment on camera - somewhat surreptitiously I may say - as I searched the Diggers Club catalogue (The Fruit Edition) which arrived in today's post, to identify the best buys of the season.  

As if I would know the first thing about about which plants to buy.  Not that I'd let a small matter such as absence of expertise stop me.  

My suggestions - which the resident gardener may accept or reject - were as follows:

• a Macadamia nut bush, which I concede is a bit speculative.  It may not like a frosty Canberra morning but if it survives there's the worry it could grow to 3 metres high by 3 metres wide.  I look forward to the day I suggest to Spike she harvests nuts from the top of that bush;
• a blueberry bush - superfood apparently - but not cheap so there's a bargain (if you discount all the hours of labour the gardener will need to put in);
• three types of raspberry - a favourite of the gardener - so I'm trying to curry favour there;
• a loganberry - because one can;
• a marionberry - because they look delicious in the photograph;
• broad bean seeds - because breadth is never a failing;
• spring onion seeds - because you never know when you'll need a spring onion; and 
• kohlrabi seeds - "a cool climate fast growing vegetable that tastes like cabbage but grows like turnip" apparently.  Now there's a root vegetable I never knew existed until today.

ceci n'est pas un navet ...

When the plants arrive - and throughout the growing season - I shall, no doubt, offer the layman's advice.  And the resident gardener,I suspect, may choose to ignore me.

Spike and the bean stalks

Planting beans in our garden's soil ...

... can be hard work

See how Spike's garden grows

Spike, cat and corn

It has been a while since I was anywhere near Spike's veggie plot so I was hugely impressed when Spike and the cat gave me a guided tour today.  We - which is the Royal We - have corn, beans, chillies, capsicum, shallots and rhubarb growing strong in the small space at the back of the garden Spike cleared earlier in the year.  We shall eat well by the time summer draws to a close.  

Had we moved to Geelong this harvest would not now be in the making.  All sorts of signals confirm the rightness of that decision.

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails

One of the troubles of gardening is that we acquire responsibilities.  That'll be The Royal We. I am but a spectator when it comes to matters horticultural. Spike does all the work.

The - perhaps - inevitable has befallen some of the seedlings planted during the last couple of days.  Slugs and snails!  Late November / early December is thunderstorm season, as news reports will have it.  We've had four giant storms in the last couple of weeks; another localised one today over our suburb.  Sydney has had some monster-size events over the same period.

This morning we had lost the heads of a couple of sweet pea plants that Spike bedded in a pot the other day and a few of the sunflower seedlings she planted out yesterday.  It was, therefore, a determined woman that attacked - which is neither the wrong nor too strong a word to use - the gardening tasks upon our return from a visit to Bunnings.  The growing area is being liberally carpeted with sugar cane and pea straw mulches.  Severed plastic bottles are being rammed into the ground around each seedling as protection.  And for maybe half an hour after this afternoon's storm with its heavy rain Spike wandered around the garden like a heat seeking missile spotting snails that made the mistake to surface from their clammy dens in search of food - Spike's seedling sunflowers, sweet peas, beans and peas.  The offending beasts have been expelled from the garden but with less grace and ceremony than Adam and Eve when they were cast out from Eden.

Garden snail defecating, apparently

We recognise, of course, that the struggle against the garden's seemingly never-ending supply of terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs is a gargantuan endeavour - not to say futile.  But Spike is a determined woman and, despite the almost overwhelming odds arising from the innumerable hordes of slowly moving, slithering creatures that surround us and our would-be flowers and veg, I would not bet against her.

Suburban Saturday

Some days are lazier than others.  Today has been one of my laziest in a long time, almost to the point of doing nothing.  

Almost?  Reading articles in The Guardian Online and listening to the terrifically enjoyable Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode movie podcast from BBC Radio 5 Live may be about as close to doing nothing as it's possible to get.

Spike has been more active.  There has been gardening.  Despite the drenching received during the thunderstorms of the previous week and assaults by armies of snails and slugs about have of the sunflower seeds have made it into infancy.  They are about to be transplanted into the garden where, we can but hope, they'll thrive.  

Spike and the sunflower seeds

We expect great things from our little sprouts.  Spike ordered  sunflower seeds from The Diggers Club, an Australian plant supplier which describes itself as "the club for subversive gardeners".  It draws inspiration from the radical tradition of the Diggers Movement established in 1649 in England by a group of non-conformist Protestant dissenters who have been described by some as agrarian socialists.  I'm not entirely sure the socialist label exactly fits a movement of pre-industrial egalitarian thinkers and doers who not only thought about what Christian Scripture meant within a dissenting tradition but also took direct action to reclaim land to grow produce to feed the poor.  They were certainly on the right side of history even if their influence on events and the shape of Cromwell's England was slight.  But I digress.

Spike and the sunflower seeds

Spike ordered four types of sunflower (as well as fruit trees, vegetables, herbs and other flowers) from the Diggers Club, which has its base on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria.  We bought organic seeding mix from corporate giant Bunnings (until the compost heap matures we must remain a touch compromised) and Spike made individual seed pots using old, unsolicited newspapers delivered to our door, rolled around the base of an empty lemoncello bottle from a (fairly) local wine-maker at the delightful Eling Forest Winery (my favourite stop on the Hume Highway when we're driving between Canberra and Sydney).

We have Van Gogh, Moonwalker, Giant Russian and Prado Red sunflowers in the making; all tiny seedlings at the moment but quickly establishing themselves thanks to sunny days and a decent amount of rain.  Snails have raided the tray of paper pots, unfortunately, to munch their laconic way through the barely established leaves of a few of the sprouts but some seem hardy enough to recover.  Here and there new leaves are replacing those that have been devoured.  Can a snail devour?  Whether it can or not Spike is on snail watch from this point forward.

I view the growth of these plants with mild trepidation.  The smallest of the variants reaches at least two metres in height.  The Giant Russian, we are told, can grow to more than 3 metres high with a flower head of approximately 40 centimetres in diameter.  And, of course, the heads turn to follow the sun as it crosses the sky.  That's a bit too Triffid like for my comfort.  In a few weeks we may need to lock the doors to keep ourselves safe as we sleep in our bed.