21 Mar - The cherry on top

 

الرحمن الرحیم بسم الله

In the name of Allah most Gracious, most Merciful.

 

21 March 2014.

One would be surprised at how productive a full day could be or should I say how fruitful a day could be. Gardening surely teaches us patience – to wait and see whether a bush is thriving after a transplant. Perseverance – doing all that bending down, sowing, weeding and nogal doing it despite complaints from one’s back. Sometimes one can be foolhardy sowing seeds and hoping it would make it through the winter. But the joy of those hours spent and seeing the fruits of one’s labour – is priceless, Allah hu Akbar. And feeding someone from the garden or oneself - the cherry on top. Everything tastes so much better, fresh from the farm.



mulberry cuttings

We took some cuttings from the top of a mulberry tree and stuck them into plastic bags of soil and after two weeks small buds were obvious. Subhaanallah, then something strange happened to the 7 cm cuttings – it produced mulberries too. Talk about children having babies. We nipped that in the bud literally because we knew that the berries would cause strain on the cuttings growth and development. Talk about cuttings today I realised I am so old school when a friend of my son started talking about how he clones plants. “What? Oh taking small cuttings" OK, he is not talking about a few drops of sap in a petri dish.

I am sure if Kahlil Gibran wrote about friendship and gardening it would something like this:

Your true friends are your garden’s needs answered.

Their offerings make possible for you to sow with love and reap with thanksgiving

Thus, they are your garden’s sustenance and hearth.

For you come to them with your need of assistance and seek them for peace.

 Ja, I really feel poetic, had help with the planting yesterday and another friend who brought flower seeds all the way from Azaadville. Just before the sun went down I scattered some of the poppy seeds lightly in the flowerbed and sprinkled handfuls of sand over them, because the seeds are miniscule. Aah it this not happiness?  Some curry leaves and butter nut seeds in exchange and for the manual labour, a carrier bag full of basil and chillies (cayenne and jalapeno) to make a tasty pesto.

Recipe:

·         About 3 handfuls of basil leaves, with stalks removed and rinsed.
·         A handful of rocket
·         A heaped tablespoon of either pine nuts or almond nuts roasted in a bit of olive oil until caramel coloured.
·         1 large clove of garlic.
·         Half a teaspoon of salt
·         3 tablespoons of olive oil
·         A good dash of freshly squeezed lemon
·         Finely grated parmesan cheese

Place altogether (except cheese) into processor and sqizz until it’s smooth and pulpy. And finally stir in the finely grated parmesan. For the more adventurist, add some chilli. Voila daar is jou pesto.

InshaAllah I hope that this vegetable patch will soon feed us completely as well as others so that we do not have to run to Pick n Pay when we run out of cucumbers or lettuce. For now we toss our own different varieties of lettuce and rocket, red onion and cucumber in a bowl and smother them with mustard, mustard seeds and olive oil. Crumble some feta over the salad and try to eat from the organic garden every day. Be it salads, a handful of curry leaves, some parsley for the fish frikkadel, basil pesto or whatever treasures it yields.

The garden also teaches us about plants. I planted some local variety of cucumber. You know the one we grew up with. That you top and tail and peel off the skin, then you rake some deep treads down the sides and rub with a fistful of salt and rinse. Well the cucumber was doing famously until the runner wound itself to the fence where it was over exposed to sunlight and the cucumber started turning yellow and bitter. The lesson? Cucumbers do its best growing mostly in shade.

It especially warms the heart to see the cuttings coming to life: the Wandering Jew groundcover, the honeysuckle, ivy, fig tree, yarrow etc. We try to avoid looking into the seed containers awaiting the sprouting of black eyed susie, forget me not’s, nasturtiums, parsley, a mix of cacti and borage. Lately we sow in recycled savoury containers, the ones with the plastic domes. In fact they work rather well if one punches some holes in the bottom, fill with soil, seed and spray with water. The dome goes over at night and in the morning one lifts the domes and places a stick in the soil to hold them up to allow the gentle rays of the sun to warm them.

I started to look for baby photos of the three strawberry mother plants and runners to compare them with the lush bed of strawberries, it’s been incredible to have been a small part of this growth. For this blog I try to take pictures but the more professional ones that capture the imagination were taken by Zaheer Carr. Later after Asr I contemplate starting to plant potatoes in tyres, my attempts last year with planting in black bags had some success but also an encounter with blight, so I play it safe with tyres. I realise that just being consistent with watering and weeding, seeding and propagation translates itself into garden progress. Even if it’s just 15 minutes at a time.

Jumuah Mubarak and I hope you all enjoy Human Rights Day – It is your It’s a Human Right to eat nutritious food, waarde uit die aarde.J

Later, wasalaam.

Yasmine
https://www.facebook.com/ilearningacrossborders

New peppers bushes