Greed

Summer is coasting. The days are hot and humid and work in the garden revolves around keeping the green in check and harvesting.

This quiet time unlike that of winter is a good time for reflection on what worked and didn’t work in the seasons gardening. Winter is a looking ahead time, a planning for the coming warmth… a yearning more like it. Now though,  is the reflection on the absolute failure of my foray into vegetable gardening. What a disaster!! I did learn a few choice things:

• Vegetables need a continuous flow of attention. My style is to work with indigenous plants, nurture them into adult form and then maintain them from a distance. Vegetables need an eye upon them, all of the time. This is not just to feed and water them, it is also to protect them.
• Everything that man eats, everything else loves as well. That means the chickens, the birds, the rats, the insects… What could have possibly encouraged humans to farm with such overwhelming odds against them?
• Growing organic when nature seems to be conspiring against you is a challenge. When you wake up in the morning and find your baby crop devastated by a marauding snail family it takes herculean strength to not run to the shop and get the most lethal dose of whatever will fry those f@*#$% now!!
• Chickens learn how to find your most promising plants and devour them. When after ignoring your baby watermelon you come home to find them preening themselves with satisfaction and all your babies are picked out of their trays and drying in the mid day sun try an internal scream, imagine them stewing in a pot but realise that they did not do this to spite you. it may be hard to imagine that that look on their faces is not laughter or a smirk, this  is just what they do.

Anyway, i have lost my train of thought. I wanted to share the good news that Hope is indeed a *** drum roll *** GIRL!! Yay, I shouted with glee too. It was evident from her behaviour. Female baby chickens, pullets as they are called, do not stray far from Mom. They have a whole other energy to males who tend to be more adventurous and independent. The funniest things is that I kept Hope because I was under the impression that she belonged to Nonyana, the seabright. Now that she has grown her features are most undeniably those of the Crazy Ballerina, a silkie.

Boy this is a round about way of talking about greed. I am getting there. What this is all leading to is that after that bit of success I am trying the same ploy with two other sitting hens. One is the daughter of Blackie the Pekin that died, affectionately named Houdini. The other is the Ballerina who has been sitting on her imaginary eggs as per usual. Houdini true to her name had disappeared and i was getting pretty desperate that she was sitting on a hoard of eggs that would have me fighting with my neighbours yet again. Whe I found her, she was sitting on 14!! Can you imagine how many boys that could be!! I consulted with my friend who feeling for her said i must just leave the eggs. This was not going to be, but we negotiated a compromise. I left one egg with Houdini and gave the other to the Ballerina. Can I possibly be as lucky as with Hope??