you sow and you grow
you always return
with much more than I knew
I would hold
my hands clasp
around your neck
only to find a body
full of abundance
Gardening is always a delicate between balance of abundance and scarcity. At once you have too much, and you do not know what to make of it. But also, around the corner is total dearth, the earth has dried up and you are not able to garden any longer.
Sometimes I sit with both these situations. Sometimes I have so much basil and green leaves that I am not sure what to make with it. The next year I am struggling to grow that abundance again.
This year, some of the basil was left over in my garden beds, and it started to grow like the abundant years.
Last week or so, I also showed how I sowed some basil seeds. Some of them have already started to stick their familiar heads through the ground. On the left (below) and right (below) you can see these seedlings trying to grow. In the middle (below) some of the seedlings have become bigger and stronger from the previous year. Only recently, they have managed to sprout, laying dormant, waiting for the bigger plants to be cut.
Above, I have started to make cuttings from the big basil plant as well. I hope that some of these will shoot roots, so that I can have that bounty of basil again.
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Elsewhere in the garden, with my raised bed experiment, I needed to give the very dried out bed some much needed compost. In the photograph below-left, you might be able to make out how empty the bed has become. Below-middle, you can see that I filled the beds up nicely with some fresh compost. And I took this opportunity to sow some wild rocket seeds, as the wild rocket seems to be the ones growing the best in this raised bed experiment.
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And before I needed to fly back to my fiance again, leaving the garden and seedlings the capable hands of family members, I repotted some of the cuttings that indicated good growth. This took a while, as almost all of the cuttings made it this round.
Here, I transplanted some forever flowers and rosemary cuttings. Many moons ago, I showed how I made a couple of cuttings of especially the forever flowers. It took a 100 days or so for these cuttings to get where they are today.
Time is a strange thing.
But now, I can reap the rewards, as when these cuttings will turn into big and lovely new plants, I can start the whole process again, and again, ad infinitum. There is some philosophical beauty in this perpetual process, with no real end in sight.
As you can see below, my process is simple. From the smaller pots (or containers) to the bigger ones. This will give the roots new and fresh compost to feed on. It will also ensure that the roots will not "tie" and "knot" at the bottom of the container.
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Alas, gardening is a perpetual run up a hill only to see the ball rolling down the hill again. Much like Sisyphus, I am happy with this process, smiling all the while I know that I will roll the same ball up the hill again.
Bliss in perpetuity.
For now, happy gardening, and keep well.
All of the musings and writings are my own, albeit inspired by the bliss from the process of growing plants. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300.