Saving morning glory, planting salvia, potting up mint, doing the Chelsea Chop and the Twilight Saga revisited.
Hello friends! Here are my five minute forays for this week. I hope you’re all coping ok…I’m clinging on!
Monday
After the announcement that changed nothing, the malaise has reached epic proportions. I feel like I’m in a Chekov play, waiting, waiting for something that never comes. The wind has been wuthering around all night and there are no signs of it abating. As far as I’m concerned the only acceptable time for wind is when I’m on top of a mountain or on the rare occasions I go running. Otherwise wind is basically not allowed. It’s a bit like nails down a blackboard for me; I end up like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Make it stop. Make it stop. The plants don’t like it either. Imagine you are a seedling - that delicate balance between growing leaf and root is essential to your survival…too little humidity and the moisture that your immature root system is working its arse off to pump into the rest of you is getting wicked away, WICKEDLY and mercilessly - like being blasted for twelve hours with a freezing cold hairdryer. Eventually you just can’t keep up the hard work and your leaves wither. You are at death’s door unless Laetitia comes and saves you. Well that. The morning glory I sowed and planted out at the weekend has suffered this fate. Well, in fact I was TEMPTING fate by putting them out so early (good weather will make me do that every time). They are in a terrible state. I bring the entire pot back in to my warm kitchen, douse it with water and hope for the very best. I water everything else too, and perform some emergency tying in on the sweet peas, several stems of which have collapsed overnight. I retreat back indoors. I loathe wind.
Eldest is reading the Twilight saga. I never read it but have vivid memories of India Knight (the first person I ever followed on Twitter and who sweetly sometimes reads this newsletter) tweeting madly about the books in 2009 while I was a new, first-time mother. I’ve wanted to read them ever since and still haven’t. I initially bought the books for myself and suddenly thought that they might be just the thing for my Hunger-Games mad girl. Let’s yank her out of dystopian and plonk her in angsty goth territory shall we? I briefly wonder if they are too mature for an 11 year old but, well, as long as she is reading I honestly don’t care. And boy is she reading. By the end of the day she has demolished three quarters of book one. I have to pull her away for a walk.
Tuesday
The dishwasher has not been started when I come downstairs and I spend the first ten minutes of my precious day copying and pasting ‘I hate you’ three hundred times into a WhatsApp message to my Rotter. So productive and LOVING. Ugh. The wind has thankfully stopped, and the morning glory are slowly recovering in my kitchen hospital. I pot up the mint from which I rooted cuttings a couple of weeks ago. It’s incredibly easy - you just cut a piece of mint off an old plant - 5-10cm will do it - and put it in a vase of water. Roots will appear and you plant these in their own pots. Do this once and you will never buy mint again. I put some more stems in water for my neighbours (who have adopted the results of all my kiddy seed sowing exploits at the beginning of lockdown)…they were so sweetly appreciative that I now know what to do with the gargantuan number of parsley seedlings I have still to pot up…and the rest.
And then I chop the geranium phaeum as it is beginning to flop over. This is what’s known as ‘The Chelsea Chop’ and it’s something I do more and more as the years go by and my confidence increases. I’ve written all about it here, but in a nutshell it’s when you chop perennials in order to delay flowering or produce plants with less flop. I am TERRIBLE at staking, and I adore late summer bounty so I employ this method for both of those reasons. I usually chop the G. phaeum right to the ground but this year I am enjoying the leaves too much to do that to myself, so I cut the flowers off, plonk them in a vase and call it a day.
As usual it’s a day of two halves - five year old just about manages to do her drawing of a mini beast (I don’t love the concept of mini beasts…it’s horribly infantilising…why not just learn about spiders and woodlice and caterpillars properly, giving them the respect they deserve? Anyway. Next week when she’s not doing mini beasts, she will no-doubt want to draw them all the time. But today she is drawing me, in different guises. There is me as a mermaid, and there is me in a very nice dress with my boobs out. By the afternoon we have exhausted ourselves completely and I have retreated into myself, unwilling to speak, let alone answer questions about what’s for supper or listen to things about minecraft. So I make them write a list about what they want for their birthdays (always keeps them quiet for ten minutes).
Wednesday
When will I wake up not agog, not incensed at this? It’s not like I haven’t had plenty of time to get used to it. Today is planting day and I manage to put seven of my salvia seedlings into the flowerbeds with not much fuss. I do love the fact that something we build up in our minds as a big deal can take so little time if only we will BEGIN. I adore that they are now IN and can now start growing. The weather is so dry I will have to be ready with a watering can daily in order to make sure they reach their full potential…but I know these plants, and baby, I’m SO IN. I make a mental note to add them to my morning watering routine (it’s the thing that happens first, before anything else (did you know that’s where the term BAE came from?) Before I feed my middle child his porridge and before I make myself a cup of tea. Before I brush my own teeth. Before. Anything. Else.
The morning glories are slowly recovering indoors. I water them too. My dustmen come and we have our morning chats. My chief dustman is called Les. He is extremely sociable and kind. He takes things away that I probably ought not to put out for the dustmen. We chat about what his wife is reading (he can’t remember the author, but knows that she is CONSUMED), and how his children are coping with lockdown, and about the fact that the workload has increased threefold since coronavirus hit. He is particularly concerned about how much our street is drinking. He says never mind coronavirus…that we will all die from liver disease and we need to take care. He says that garden waste is a particular problem…just so much of it. I spend the rest of the day on the street WhatsApp, organising a whip-round for these, my favourite people, my darling dustmen. We make a huge card, and everyone posts money through my door. It’s like my front door has become an enormous cash machine! I’m rich for a day!
Thursday
I feel like a hunted animal. I try twelve times to go out and mow, but my children can always sense when I need to be on my own and, true to their EXCELLENT survival instincts, wind their fat little wrists HARD around the proverbial apron strings and refuse to let go. What they don’t know is that if only they would leave me be, just for twenty minutes, if only they would cease to NEED me, we could totally and utterly be friends. SWEAR. There are some days, (good days) when gardening and being in the garden can be a shared, beautiful experience, one where all of us can be together in the best way possible. These are the days when I feel like I have this thing licked. And then there are days like today, when I can only contemplate being in the garden ALONE, like medicine. Garden-as-sanctuary. The idea of including them, and all that this entails, feels like too high a mountain to climb and I just basically want to cry. So today I do a houseplant audit…watering, feeding where necessary, wiping leaves and misting with water. I send them outside to play frequently, but I don’t even set foot outside myself because I know that if I do I will want so much to have time alone here, and I won’t be able to, and that will be unbearable. It’s not always like this…but today it is.
The day is saved by my beautiful friend and her husband who put on a zoom quiz for her birthday…the green part of a strawberry shares its name with which part of a boat?…finally a question I can answer! Did you know that the USA is wider than the Moon? I didn’t know that.
Friday
Glorious weather and I put the morning glory outside again for the day, telling it I’m very sorry and to please trust me again. So here’s the thing. I thought it’d be a great opportunity in lockdown, for people to ‘honour’ their own body clocks. I’m not sure where this harebrained scheme came from…something I read about children needing sleep in the same way that they need food and love etc etc. The problem is that I have three night owls in my house (the two girls and my rotter) and two early birds (myself and my son). Son’s head hits the pillow at 7pm and he’s snoring by 7.02. Not so easy for me, because I’m a grownup, and can’t sleep through the multitude of things that happen between 7 and 11pm. Anyway, I’m letting the tween 11 yr old sleep until 10am. Where was I going with this? Not sure. Oh yes…the fact that not only are my delicious solitary early mornings scuppered by a minecraft and porridge addicted 6 year old, but I have also lost my evenings, and also my LATE evenings to the tween, who now stays up for like EVER. Thoroughly UNAMUSING. Bed is not alone time either, because I have my five year old sleeping with us. What I’m getting at here is that it’s the perfect storm really. I spend all morning making sure they do their times tables etc. A bit of language learning…nothing too taxing but obvs TAXING because they are THERE. And after lunch I creep outside, whilst they watch David Attenborough so I can mow the lawn (ALONE). I have plans for it - the same ones as I had back in 2018 when I left the middle to grow and it was bloody glorious. But thwarted yet again. They KNOW, you see. They sense when they are not at the forefront of every fibre of my being. I know the feeling. It’s the same thing that happens when you are young, and he stops calling, and rather than playing it cool and doing your own thing (which, by the way would have him bashing down your door in a nanosecond) you cling on tighter…you call! you confront! you wail about how anguished you are about it to your friends! All because your brain and your body, not long evolved from wherever it began in the soupy primordial ooze has mistaken this person as something essential to your very survival! The children have no idea that I will always be there for ever and a day. Their ancient brains tell them they must stay at the centre of their mother’s addled grey matter at all times…and so that is what they do. All day. All. Bloody. Day. So yes I creep outside with the mower battery, and then a child arrives and wants to help, and I have to capitulate; give up my precious alone time. And let him mow. He knows how to do it - this was something we worked on back at the beginning of lockdown. It feels so difficult today. I want to scream. We manage finally to complete the project, together (sort-of) and he gets bored. I sit there, thrilled that I achieved this one small thing, and I know that tomorrow there will be a break.
x Laetitia
ps you might these useful:
How to make a mini-meadow (aka let your grass grow long)
The Chelsea Chop - how to prolong beauty in your garden with a pair of scissors
Deadheading: The how’s and whys
How to clip box without agonising over it
It’s hanging basket time! - here are my recommendations.
How to sow and grow squash, pumpkins and gourds
pps I want to say an ENORMOUS thank you to everyone here who sweetly left a review on Amazon. I am so massively grateful because it lets the algorithm know that my book is read and appreciated, which in turn prompts it to suggest the book to new eyes. So THANK you so much kind friends, and if you haven’t bought, or reviewed it yet, then please do consider it? Takes five minutes! xxx
I simultaneously chuckled my way through this, nodding in agreement and also wanted to hug you and let you know one day they will leave you alone. You'll have about five years (if you are lucky) and then you'll be wondering if they will ever want to spend any time with you ever again, trying to coerce them with a film and delicious snacks. Parenthood is cruel!