there were a bunch of old cabbages to dig out and two rows of mostly untouched silverbeet to dig up. the old bugger wanted me to dig up and move the 7 remaining leeks so i did that rather than argue even though it seemed a little unnecessary. i was exhausted by the time i finished that and i hadn’t even started tilling yet. normally i start to feel easily fatigued before an infusion then feel stronger a little after the infusion but that hasn’t happened this month. i didn’t get the whole garden tilled. but not because i ran out of gas, the the rotor tiller did. okay. we both did. and we didn’t have any spare petrol in a can, probably a good thing. after i dragged the tiller out of the garden i sat down and started feeling light-headed and dizzy and had to sit there for a while trying to blink away the white ball of light forming in my vision. the old bugger had a friend come to visit so when i heard a car pulling into the driveway i got up and went to see who it was. a guy come to borrow his trailer. when he reversed his truck up to the trailer the old bugger couldn’t lift the trailer to hitch it onto the truck and i was still just standing there, dizzy and away with the fairies. so after the guy left i got a bit of a scolding, which is fair enough. i’ve been lecturing him about his heart valve and not pushing himself to the point of having a heart attack for months. so i went home and got all jacked up on paracetamol.
i felt better by saturday morning and i was hearing motorbikes zooming down the beach so i got up and started getting my whitebaiting gear ready. but once i started paying attention i noticed that people were spending, at most, maybe half an hour down at the mouth of the river then going back home. so, probably not catching any whitebait. which was good because i put the handle of my net on the wrong way and spent way too long looking at it and wondering why it looked weird. by the time i got down the beach there was no one even there and the waves were coming in from the wrong direction anyway.
on sunday i finished tilling the garden, there was only one little weedy patch left to do so i went back over the whole garden with the tiller. it’s much easier once you’ve already tilled, the soil isn’t all compacted and the weeds have all been shredded. peter seemed to wander around, mostly bored. i mowed the lawn around the garden after tilling then we sowed some peas. there’s still a bunch of things to do up there. i have to spray all the weeds out the front then till that patch too, which i’m not looking forward to because that ground is full of rocks which make the rotor tiller bounce around so much all you can do is hold on tight and hope it bounces in the direction you want it to go. my pumpkin patch also needs weeding too but i’m going to have to do that by hand because i’ve got two mounds piled up in there with the seaweed under them that i want to stay that way. i read that you’re supposed to grow pumpkins on a little pile of dirt because it apparently helps the dirt warm up in the sun and they like that. so i want to try that. last spring we had a lot of rain and i struggled to get any pumpkins to sprout so i’ll sprout them on a windowsill this year and have them growing nice and early. all of this should make for a perfect pumpkin patch. aaaand then i’ll have even more pumpkins that i don’t know what to do with but that’s a problem for next autumn adam, he can deal with it.
when i dug out the old silverbeet last week i kept some of the little baby ones that had sprouted naturally and planted them in the garden here. it’s probably a little early but it’s now almost full. it has silverbeet, chives, parsley, celery and one zucchini stuffed into the least sunny corner since i don’t really like zucchini and tend to only grow them resentfully and even in a shaded corner it’ll probably grow more zucchini than anyone wants to eat.
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