My list of summer gardening tasks, doing scary things, and why I haven't had a bath since 2009 🛀🏽
Hello Friends!
I completely forgot to write a letter last week - I am so sorry. I think my brain has decided it needs a holiday. The problem is the trials of coping with the social diaries of three humans as well as my own. They all have extremely busy lives and I can't understand how; they're not even adults yet. I am hideously strict about playdates, and parties, and everything in between and yet we still have a situation where I am poring over a schedule wondering how on earth I'm going to get everyone to the places they need to be at the right time. This is when I long to move to somewhere we don't know anybody but these pesky children WILL MAKE FRIENDS in the most impossible way. I try to stop them. I try and be all scary and witchy to frighten any potential little OTHERS away but they just keep coming. My children are just too lovely I guess. Anyway, I have resorted to drawing out the summer holidays in my journal, double-size, so that I can get an idea of who needs to be doing what and when, and I stare at it forlornly, in the same way as I stare into my fridge, eyes glazed over, wondering what on earth I will eat (or in this case, DO). All of which to say, I am sorry there was no letter last week... I know you were all extremely disappointed 😆
In addition to my rundown this week, I thought I'd give you a simple list of all the things I do on a regular basis in the garden at this time of year, and let me tell you friends, it's MINIMAL, because it's JUNE...almost July in fact, which means that the priority list is topped with the word 'lolling' and everything else just falls into line below, because THAT is what a garden is FOR.
Here's what I got up to in the garden this week:
Monday
I mow. This will be the last mowing I do in the centre of my lawn for a while now, as I like to let the middle bit go a bit meadow-esque over the summer. It allows beneficial insects and reptiles to find shelter, and it also (very importantly) cuts my mowing time in half - from fifteen odd minutes to five. And as you know, I love five minute things. I use a battery-powered mower which I adore as I don't have to deal with pesky leads. See below for other mowing benefits. I also repot my monstera plant, which has totally outgrown its pot. This is highly satisfactory and I recommend re-potting something to anyone who is anxious or unwell...it does the world of good. I use ordinary multi purpose compost with lots of perlite to keep the mixture light.
Tuesday
I go to a very posh event to celebrate the rebranded packaging for all Cowshed products. It's probably important to mention here that I haven't had a bath since 2009 (I had children, and children don't really like it when you relax in a bath. In fact you can bet on the fact that as soon as you lower yourself into a steaming hot bath (with or without scented candles and rose-petals etc) ...as soon as your body is entirely submerged...as soon as you are, in other words, PROPERLY WET, someone will start crying. Seriously, it's a real thing. They KNOW, you see, when you are about to exhale. THEY KNOW, AND THEY DON'T LIKE IT. It's the same with singing. You start humming along to a song you like, and then there's that moment when you tip over from humming along to LOSING yourself and starting to belt the thing out, Bonnie Tyler style, for the sheer joy of the music, because you love that song, and it makes you feel young, and happy and AWAY from the BAKED BEANS. Friends, they don't like it. Not AT ALL. They simply cannot have it if you're not focussed on them. It simply won't do. Children NEED you to stay focussed you see, otherwise they will literally DIE. If I go off and sing in the bath, they won't get fed...that's what their instinct is telling them, and they're right. All this to say that I am a touch out of touch with luxurious bathing products, but that's not going to prevent me from drinking champagne at 9am on a Tuesday morning in Soho House. Not at all. I didn't start with champagne. I started with some kind of lavender spritz thing which I almost immediately spilt all over Kate Watson-Smyth. Yes, her. She was incredibly nice about it. I am mortified but I really have to move on. If, however, you need a VERY CLUMSY person to come to your party and make you feel good about yourself, then invite me okay hun? Anyway, it was lovely and extremely refreshing to see a company committing to becoming sustainable without jumping on a bandwagon. The flowers were unbelievably beautiful. Each product set on a table with its corresponding ingredients in floral form. And an entire wall of roses - utterly spectacular, put together by Scarlet and Violet (see pic above). My thanks to the glorious Phoebe who invited me. I loved it and MAY even attempt having a bath.
Wednesday
I am re-starting my dormant podcast, which has been patiently waiting in the wings while I finished my book early this year. Last week (the week I forgot to do my letter) I recorded the first interview for the new series with Summer Rayne Oakes (yes, really, that is her actual name) who has written a sort of call to arms called 'How to Make a Plant Love You'. I need to let you know, friends that I have been SO STRESSED about this interview. Not because I didn't want to do it, but because I would be doing it alone, without my podcast pal Andrew, who quite rightly started his own, wonderful podcast while I was beavering away at my book, but also, crucially, used to deal with all the SOUND TECH that comes with recording a podcast. I am hideously frightened of tech. I don't trust that it won't let me down. I don't understand how it works and I will do anything to avoid having to work out stuff that my brain perceives as 'difficult'. More than once (about a million times) I have considered paying someone to do it all for me, but it just so happens that this whole nightmare has coincided with my discovery of The Big Life Journal and the concept of growth mindset. Every day for the last few weeks I have been asking my children, in an excited voice, what mistakes they made today, and high fiving them when they tell me they found this or that hard, or they forgot the other thing etc. I then ask what they learned and we all celebrate how lucky they were to have made the mistake so that they can learn the new thing and their brains can grow! YAY! (Sorry if this makes you a little bit sick in your mouth, but you see, a parent will do pretty much all of the things to make sure she's bringing her children up to be resilient, un-messable-with, curious, happy people). So yes, I've been doing all this work with my children, and realised I could go one better and model this behaviour for them...this idea of taking on something difficult, experiencing the discomfort of being not so very good at it, and eventually coming out the other side, having put in the work and the practice, proficient and, well, exultant. I don't get very many opportunities to do things I've never done before....things that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end... things I REALLY would rather not do, because I'm not sure I CAN. So I hired Lucy Lucraft to take me through the recording and editing process. She was brilliant - I love her calmness and her understated wit, and she has such gorgeous style, and a hugely interesting podcast, called 'What She Said' about online life, and the challenges faced by anyone trying to make a living out of blogging. She took me through everything about twelve times and made sure I'd written it all down. And so, armed with this, I dived in. To say I was terrified was an understatement. Speaking with Summer Rayne, wondering if I had pressed the right buttons. Wondering if anything was recording AT ALL....The last time I was this frightened was before I gave birth for the first time....JUST FOR REFERENCE, FRIENDS. The interview will be up on 9th July, when her book comes out, and I think you'll notice my terror, but hey, the recording worked! Nobody died! And crucially, nobody got paid so that I didn't have to go through something icky. So today, I did two more interviews, and they also went okay and weren't a disaster, and I told my children about it and they were happy because I was happy. The editing is getting easier also, and I am, actually, pretty EXULTANT and I have learned that I want to feel like this again, so I need to do more stuff that makes me scared. No gardening but hey folks, SO, MUCH GROWTH.😇
Thursday
I deadhead and I water, and I make sure all of my houseplants are also well watered, because we are going away for the weekend tomorrow, and it's going to be very hot. I have a new watering system for my houseplants which I am disproportionately pleased about. On the advice of the brilliant Summer Rayne Oakes, whose YouTube channel is an encyclopaedic guide to all things houseplanty, I bought some ceramic plant spikes. You soak the spike, fill the top with water and poke it into the pot, and then you put the the tube that's attached to it into a big jar or bottle of water which sits out of sight, behind your plant pot. The plant then literally takes what it needs and you can easily see how quickly it's drinking. This has been a revelation to me as I'm never sure how much to give my indoor plants, and can now see exactly what they're taking. So you basically keep topping the jar or bottle up, rather than watering the container. It's that simple. I'll be blogging about them soon, but if you have houseplants, I would urge you to buy some of these brilliant things...I'm about to order a whole lot more.
So here are the things I've been doing most these past few weeks, very much in order of importance.
1. LOLLING
This involves everything from ACTUAL lolling i.e. lying on the grass, mostly with wine, to spraying small shrieking children with hoses, which is a rather more active form of lolling, but still comes under the same category. Lolling doesn't involve any gardening whatsoever, but it does involve being in the GARDEN; hence the rest of this list.
2. MOWING
I keep saying it. You can get away with being an absolute calamity slut in the flower beds if only you will mow your lawn (or if you have no lawn, sweep your terrace and paths). If you then EDGE your lawn you get extra brownie points. it's all about creating contrast between the peaceful and the raucous. If there is a smooth bit of your garden where the eyes can rest, the messy magically moves out of messy and into JOYFUL. Another thing; I have learned that nobody cares in the slightest about the flowers in your flowerbeds other than you. They might look at your roses (people always exclaim about roses and peonies) but the thing that makes people go AHHHH is the WHOLE caboodle, which is, for the most part, made up of how much fun you are having. Just saying.
3. DEADHEADING
And I'm lumping in 'picking flowers' with this, because that too, is essentially, deadheading. When you remove the spent bloom off a plant, you stop it going to seed. If you stop it going to seed, then it will make more flowers, not because it wants to make you happy, but because it wants to make more seed. Such is the way of things. We can use the plant's natural urge to reproduce for our own pleasure. So I go round with my glass most evenings, and some sort of receptacle, removing gone-over flowers from the stems of things. I also pick my sweet peas, so I can have a little bunch of sweet smelling stuff every day
4. WATERING
If it hasn't been a day when the children have had a good soaking (and by the way, this is the very best way to bathe a child in my humble opinion) then I'll go around with a watering can, dousing all the pots. If you are an Instagram friend, you may have seen my new drip irrigation system in action. This was part of a collaboration with Gardena and I'm thrilled and amazed with myself that I managed to get the thing set up and it WORKS. I've never been good with this sort of thing, glazing over whenever confronted with the idea of reading an instruction booklet, or programming a gadget, so yes, it has taken an approach from a brand to make me try it. I'm fully kicking myself that I'd not given myself this gift before. It's not that I hate watering (I love it) it's just that I dislike the WORRY that having to water entails. Containers are entirely dependent on you for all their essentials (including food too) and sometimes, especially when it's hot, this feels a bit like having rather too many children. This system removes that worry, and for that, I am over the moon. All my argyranthemum daisies are hooked up to this system, which saves me from having to lug watering cans to them, but more importantly, it means that when we go away, they won't die. I love it when things don't die.
All the good things, as always
x Laetitia
PS In case you missed it, I was asked to write a piece for Wear and Where, run by Natasha and Alex - an exceptional duo who seem to have found a way to be fashion bloggers who don't make you want to delete the internet: (#rarebreed)... It's a gorgeous, joyful website that doesn't take itself too seriously, for the stylish (and I'm presuming, UNSTYLISH) alike. Here it is:
Five ways to spruce up your garden in a weekend