My garden

I have been digging in my garden tonight. Being an apartment dweller in a country where winter pretty much lasts for six months of the year my garden is a balcony box and four pots. I have a rose that Nymaa brought one day to show Alesia and it seems to have stayed. I have an indoor-looking plant that Mavis (a former volunteer with ADRA) gave Natalie, who gave to me when she went home on a holiday to Australia and didn't return. I have a pot with little shoots of rocket reaching for the sun. I have a pot with basil seeds in it and two have sprouted in the past week. Mid-summer is a bit late to be planting seedlings, but it required a bit of logistics to get the soil and the pots.

I needed to thin out the seedlings in the balcony box. When pulling out the weaker basil and cherry tomato plants I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. So I dug little holes for them and spaced things out a bit. Even though they are small they smell so distinctive. We can't get fresh basil here, so I am really looking forward to the first crop of fresh leaves. The little tomato plants smell like summer.

This morning I read Leunig's prayer about tomatos: "We salute the tomato: cheery, fragrant morsel, beloved provider, survivor and thriver and giver of life....The scent of its stem is summer's joy, is promise and rapture. Giving and giving and giving..."At the time I thought he was going on a little bit, but tonight in the dusk as I replanted my little tomatos I found myself wishing them well, wishing that the summer will be long enough for them to get established, that the frosts that can come here at any time will keep away until late September.