I’m a teacher and it’s the school holidays. Like lots of teachers I got sick. Again. By Wednesday I was back to pottering in the garden. This is what I’ve been up to since then.

I bought 3 cubic metres of mulch. Arborist Chip to be precise.

I mulched around the back and side of the greenhouse, I planted sweet peas seeds, I weeded the lavender garden, I mulched the lavender garden, I read chapter one in my book ‘The Revolutionary Genius of Plants’, I bought some dahlia’s online, I bought some planters online, I mulched the raised beds, I read a book about ‘grow bags’, I watered my indoor plants; I bought some herbs, 8 strawberry plants and 2 half-price plants at the garden centre (one of which is an orange flowering canna lily); I planted the herbs into tin buckets, I mulched the path between the greenhouse and the lavender garden, I made a shopping list of plant things I needed to buy but didn’t buy (a ball of garden tie, a watering can for seedlings, a plastic bucket and 2 bungy cords), I mulched under a hedge of lavender, I mulched a new garden in front of the garage that isn’t a garage, I moved a small olive tree from the orchard into a temporary planter, I pruned (thanks to Monty’s instructions) the grape vine in the orchard and moved it into a raised bed by the back deck (and moved the fig in the same garden to the left), I planted a weeping rosemary into the raised bed along with the grape and fig, I moved the ponderosa lemon (which was blocking the path) to the orchard, I pruned and mulched the flower garden and I weeded and mulched the orchard.

I have a much smaller pile of mulch.

The newly mulched area behind the greenhouse.

I really like ‘Arborist Chip’ as a mulch. It’s the best mulch I’ve used. It’s munched up branches, twigs and leaves. All of the small bits rot down quickly and provide nutrition for the soil. The bigger stuff takes longer to rot down. It’s heavy and doesn’t blow away. I can use it on sloping paths and beds. If I spread it thickly enough it suppresses the weeds.

The half-priced orange flowering canna lily.

This time last year I was running around after my son. He didn’t have his drivers licence and I was dropping him off and picking him up. I was happy to do this because I knew it’d be the last time. And it was. Now he’s at uni and he has a car. I don’t see him a lot. I miss him.

Parents don’t talk about how they feel when their kids leave them. It’s a taboo subject. As I’ve found out. I don’t care, because I don’t care about taboo subjects. In actual fact I gravitate towards them like a waxeye to a winter flower. When I bring the subject up with friends, family and colleagues I get one of two responses.

The first response is always accompanied by a look of pity and runs along these lines ‘it’s not a problem for me’ or ‘I was so pleased to have more time’, it’s often accompanied with well-meaning advice about ‘how I need to keep myself busy and not dwell on it’.

The second response is always accompanied with a deep sigh and then the feelings tumble out ‘it’s a kind of grief’ they say, ‘they don’t need me anymore,’ ‘their brother misses them,’ ‘we’ll never have family holidays again,’ ‘the house feels empty,’ ‘I feel so sad’, ‘I look at old phots of them when they were little and I want to cry.’

And so, yeah, I have a lot of time to garden and write, which is bittersweet. Gardening is especially therapeutic.

I was listening to a garden expert last week. They were giving advice on gardening in an ecologically sound way. They said that growing plants straight into garden soil was better than using raised beds, especially really high-sided raised beds (which just ate up soil). I took offence. Maybe it was the superior tone in the experts voice, with a hint of arrogance. I knew for a fact that this garden expert had a very big garden and when you have a very big garden you forget what it’s like to have a small garden or a very small garden or no garden.

If your back garden is concrete then growing in garden soil isn’t an option. If your garden is a porch or a widow sill then planting into garden soil isn’t an option. What is an option is container and pot gardening.

I don’t blame the garden expert. Soil is such a hot topic amongst gardeners. If you have access to garden soil then it makes sense to use it, but not everyone does and let’s not make people feel that they’re letting the planet down by growing stuff in containers.

I use pots and containers to grow all of my smaller food producing plants. That’s because I have 2 dogs and a septic tank who all share the same space. One of the down sides to container growing is that the soil disappears and you need to top it up, but if you have a system then it’s not a bother. The more I garden the more I understand that having systems is critical. One of my systems is that I mulch and make compost.

I have 3 creative gardeners to thank: Arthur Parkinson, Aaron Bertelsen and Ron Finley. They make container gardening beautiful. Arthur and Aaron each wrote a book on container gardening. I found out about Ron Finley in a book called ‘The Planthunter: Truth, Beauty, Chaos and Plants’ by Georgina Reid.

Ron Flinley’s garden in the book ‘The Planthunter: Truth, Beauty, Chaos and Plants’ by Georgina Reid.

If we accept that we live in challenging environmental times, then we need to approach gardening with an open mind, a generous heart, a creative eye and an anarchist’s spirit. Get rid of the rules I say. If you’re growing stuff then that’s better than not growing stuff.

Oh yeah, tree of the week, that’s a tough one. I’m going to say lemon tree. Citrus grows really well on the Kapiti Coast. I stand on my back deck and look at all my neighbours back gardens and every single one of them has a big old lemon tree covered in lemons.

See you next Sunday.