Sunday, July 20, 2008 Covington: Mary, Mary By Gary Covington Looking In
QUITE contrary - how does your garden grow? So asks a childhood nursery rhyme and with all this rain we're getting my garden's gone into warp drive.
The grass pretends its business as usual; sitting there, green, innocence itself, but as soon as I walk around the corner of the house, as soon as my back is turned, it grows. And, with this biblical portion of rain we're getting, my garden has acquired a water feature -- a pond where there was no pond before.
The ground is waterlogged, it cannot absorb anymore wet. Casa Covington is built on a hillside; rain falling uphill of the property is unable to percolate to any great depth and instead trickles down the hill, just under the surface, to any weakness or break in the layering of rocks and soil and there wells to the surface. A mini-spring. This might be a building's foundation or a canal or, in my case, the garden's rear wall and here the water is oozing to the surface and forming a small pond. Or a large puddle. Either way it's become a hangout for the garden's wildlife.
Snag is uphill there are houses and a used oil merchant. One day my pond whiffs of sewage -- and sewage is like children, you can only stand your own -- and the next day it's coated with an oily silvery sheen. Here's hoping, fingers crossed, that the rain lets up allowing the water table level to fall.
The other recent creation in my garden is a compost heap, my very first, commissioned three months ago to provide next year's muck for a proposed vegetable garden at the rear of the house.
My knowledge of gardening is next to nothing, about what could be written on the back of a seed packet, and so I warmed up the laptop and asked Mr. Google about composting.
The first site I looked at offered -- amazingly -- "Troubleshooting compost heaps". Gone are the days of a gardener flinging his weeds and grass cuttings into a handy corner and letting the heap steam and stew in its own juice. Now he consults a Ph.D. in compost management and is advised to buy a compost heap starter kit -- thermometers, a swatch of litmus paper and a can of verms (what else do you get in a vermin culture kit?). Techno-gardening. I clicked off.
The patch at the back -- the proposed cornucopia of edibles -- is at the moment a tangle of strapping weeds. There used to be vegetables there; strange Filipino varieties like a creeping, prickly vine-like thing, which was added to chicken stews, kangkong, and the obnoxious eggplant.
I'll not be growing eggplant -- the most tasteless vegetable in the universe -- but more manly fare like onions, tomatoes and okra (bhindi bhaji -- heaven) which can be whipped up into a tasty rat.
Rat? Ratatouille. The single man's salvation. Healthy, almost any veggie will do and, with a dash of spices -- curry powder for an Indian rat, coriander for a Greek rat, whole cardamoms for an explosive Iraqi rat -- a mixed veg to go with any meat course.
The rain's coming on again, dimpling the surface of my new pond. The grass will like it. Do a bit more growing. Demand a cutting. Where's those garden shears?
