Thursday, March 19, 2009

One night out gardening

I think this is the last week before we lose daylight saving time. It was nice to break the gardening drought and weed and mulch this evening.

I weeded around my rhubarb and cleared the path leading up to the rhubarb. It is a brick path which the birds flicked mulch and compost onto and then the weeds took hold in the lovely growing medium. I think the bricks can come out and go somewhere where the lovely red can be enjoyed. We can replace the bricks with wood chip next time we get a big bag.

I found a broccoli head!!!! Oh lovely lovely. I've had such mixed experiences with broccoli that I hadn't expected success. Broccoli for tea tomorrow then. I did weed and then put my comfrey brew on the younger broccoli plants and mulched them up with pea straw.

Of course I killed a lot of caterpillars.

I weeded around the hydrangea cuttings which I planted earlier this year. Then I laid the weeds around the plants as mulch. Of the four which I inspected, three have 'taken'. I think the fourth was the one which Favourite Handyman drove the lawn mower into.

The radiccio is turning deep red instead of green! Yes I know this is what it is supposed to do but there was no sign for so long and now it looks completely gorgeous. I think it would be worth planting for its looks alone. Maybe it will feature in some whimsical potager in my future garden. I've read about creating magic garden spaces for children before and the idea does appeal. We have the beginnings of a tree hut to start us off so far...

Sometimes I encounter people who turn my life upside down, or some part of it. There is an educational psychologist called Laughton King who is pressing all my wow buttons tonight. It is nothing to do with gardening, or anything I tend to blog about. But now I'm thinking about how some people think in pictures and what it means for them in a word-biased education system and I'm looking at my son and thinking about one thousand things and recognising so much in LK's book. Tomorrow I get to start [again] on really the biggest challenge to every morning: changing how we get our son to get dressed so I keep my cool for the first hours in each day. Nova if you are reading, I am very interested to know if you and/or Paul have encountered LK. As LK acknowledges, his stuff isn't particularly original, but it is so accessible. And it has walked into my life at just the powerful time.

2 comments:

Nova said...

*delurks from dark corner* yep i'm here ;) and no i haven't, i'll ask paul though :) i know he does do a bit of work in his class trying to adapt to different thinking patterns.. ie doing lettering, most of the kids learn to put the letters together from a combo of long stick, short stick, curved line etc, but for some that is much too abstract so they use more visual descriptions ie open mouth (C), closed tunnel (O) etc so it turns an abstact symbol into something that they can actually picture.. dunno if that's quite what you mean tho :) i'll ask paul huh? lol..

Leanne said...

Hi
Thanks for heads up re Laughton Smith - I have contacted him - awesome fella! And will be helping set up some of his talks here in December when he returns to the North Island

Love Leanne