Attention: This Is a Real Life Post
2011-05-20 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rodoYou may have noticed that I haven’t posted a lot lately. One reason for that is, as I mentioned, my recent obsession with dramas. Another reason is far more difficult for me to write about, since I lack all the vocabulary. Which is odd, really. My English is very good by now, but in some areas, I just don’t know how to express myself. Two of them being cooking/baking and gardening.
So while I spent a lot of time outside, I thought about what kind of flowers I would pick as a child, how vicious some weeds are, when which herbs were to be planted, which flowers to pick and so on and so forth. Oddly enough, I found out I already know most of the words – I might even feel confident in using them in fiction or a poem – I just had no idea what the thing behind the word is supposed to look like. I knew that lady’s smock is a wildflower with small blossoms of a pale violet, but I didn’t know that I used to pick them and arrange them with buttercups (which I am not supposed to call that, since this particular flower is only called that in the southern parts of Germany, according to wiki). I knew parsley was a common kitchen herb, but I didn’t know it referred to Petersilie. In a way, I think my knowledge of these words was as theoretical as the knowledge a blind person has of some visual terms.
So this post means I’m working on my vocabulary, mostly. We had a very dry period until Saturday, with maybe two short periods of rain since the beginning of April, when my mother and I started to work on this seriously. First, we started a new herb garden by digging out the old tomato beds and putting in new earth. And then we planted peppermint, lovage, sage, tarragon and added thyme and chive last week. So far they are growing, but something has started eating the tiny little plantlings. I suspect it might be slugs or snails, but I’m not sure yet. I hope they won’t eat more, since they seem to find the often used parsley most delicious.
My next project was the flower bed in front of the southern wall. Well, “flower bed” isn’t quite the term one should apply to what was going on in that bed. Once upon a time, my father intended it as a flower bed, and planted flowers, sparsely, but it used to be for flowers. He also had the genius idea of planting ivy and holly and similar stuff around it, to obscure the ugly stones that frame the bed. Oh, and one of my “rescue plants” (“Mummy, can I keep it?” *puppydogeyes* was mostly about plants in my case), a little holly bush, was planted inside the bed.
Fast forward ten years of neglect. The flowers were still there, somewhere under a layer of dead leaves, grass, a web of ivy and ground-elder, which is the worst weed imaginable. The little holly bush had grown enough to dominate half the bed, and one of the groundcover plants had started making its way under the roof tiles, slowly destroying the rain pipe. My mother doesn’t like weeding, and she doesn’t much care for flower beds or chaos. It made me feel like the gardening version of Indiana Jones to free the lily of the valleys (another one of those words that I knew) from all the rubbish that covered them. I also found some crocuses when I pulled them out accidentally due to their similarity to grass, found and nearly killed the chrysanthemums, and some other flowers that I don’t know the names of. The snowdrops evidently didn’t survive the battle, while the iris just grew on top of the chaos.
Now my fingers look like I’m a professional cat arm wrestler, but the flowerbed is kind of orderly. I planted some gladioli, Allium moly, cornflowers and Clarkia amoena and hope that they grow.
My next project is going to be the old herb garden, which is … well, there is no ivy and an immense redcurrant bush (my fault, too) instead of holly, which means it should be easier, right?
So while I spent a lot of time outside, I thought about what kind of flowers I would pick as a child, how vicious some weeds are, when which herbs were to be planted, which flowers to pick and so on and so forth. Oddly enough, I found out I already know most of the words – I might even feel confident in using them in fiction or a poem – I just had no idea what the thing behind the word is supposed to look like. I knew that lady’s smock is a wildflower with small blossoms of a pale violet, but I didn’t know that I used to pick them and arrange them with buttercups (which I am not supposed to call that, since this particular flower is only called that in the southern parts of Germany, according to wiki). I knew parsley was a common kitchen herb, but I didn’t know it referred to Petersilie. In a way, I think my knowledge of these words was as theoretical as the knowledge a blind person has of some visual terms.
So this post means I’m working on my vocabulary, mostly. We had a very dry period until Saturday, with maybe two short periods of rain since the beginning of April, when my mother and I started to work on this seriously. First, we started a new herb garden by digging out the old tomato beds and putting in new earth. And then we planted peppermint, lovage, sage, tarragon and added thyme and chive last week. So far they are growing, but something has started eating the tiny little plantlings. I suspect it might be slugs or snails, but I’m not sure yet. I hope they won’t eat more, since they seem to find the often used parsley most delicious.
My next project was the flower bed in front of the southern wall. Well, “flower bed” isn’t quite the term one should apply to what was going on in that bed. Once upon a time, my father intended it as a flower bed, and planted flowers, sparsely, but it used to be for flowers. He also had the genius idea of planting ivy and holly and similar stuff around it, to obscure the ugly stones that frame the bed. Oh, and one of my “rescue plants” (“Mummy, can I keep it?” *puppydogeyes* was mostly about plants in my case), a little holly bush, was planted inside the bed.
Fast forward ten years of neglect. The flowers were still there, somewhere under a layer of dead leaves, grass, a web of ivy and ground-elder, which is the worst weed imaginable. The little holly bush had grown enough to dominate half the bed, and one of the groundcover plants had started making its way under the roof tiles, slowly destroying the rain pipe. My mother doesn’t like weeding, and she doesn’t much care for flower beds or chaos. It made me feel like the gardening version of Indiana Jones to free the lily of the valleys (another one of those words that I knew) from all the rubbish that covered them. I also found some crocuses when I pulled them out accidentally due to their similarity to grass, found and nearly killed the chrysanthemums, and some other flowers that I don’t know the names of. The snowdrops evidently didn’t survive the battle, while the iris just grew on top of the chaos.
Now my fingers look like I’m a professional cat arm wrestler, but the flowerbed is kind of orderly. I planted some gladioli, Allium moly, cornflowers and Clarkia amoena and hope that they grow.
My next project is going to be the old herb garden, which is … well, there is no ivy and an immense redcurrant bush (my fault, too) instead of holly, which means it should be easier, right?
