Playing With Water (18 page)

The first blowflies have arrived. The crepe myrtle tree looked dead, but when I peered closely there were tiny reddish-green buds.

I wonder how the five geese sitting on eggs on Peri’s farm are going?

Dusk. Pigeons are on the lawn. Everything is quiet.

Today Terry leant over the fence and asked if I had any land to spare. Puzzled at first, I found he wanted to sow some sweetcorn seeds in a bare patch of my land.

‘The rain has leached out all the goodness from my patch,’ he said. ‘And I’ve been planting vegetables for too long. I have to give it a rest.’ He’s worked that plot for forty-eight years. He said we could share the crop. I thought it was a wonderful idea. He came straight over with his spade and dug a patch about two metres long and one metre wide. Sweat flew from his head. He just turns the weeds in, no throwing out or shaking soil from the roots, in they go, for fertiliser. Three rows were made and he planted more than would be good to grow if they all came up. Now we are share-farming.

After he’d dug, Terry told me that when the corn has formed flowers, it is best to wait till a sunny day comes and then to fertilise the heads, to shower them gently with the hose from directly above. ‘Sweetcorn needs to be closely planted,’ he said, ‘to ensure fertilisation.’ When these seeds sprout, I can’t imagine pulling some up and throwing them out. If they are too thick, I won’t be able to waste them. I will just put some in another spot to grow. I have never understood how people can throw out living plants. Weeds, yes, but flowers and vegetables, no.

Have you heard of the boy at Geelong Grammar School who mapped wombat burrows by creeping out at night
and crawling down to investigate the holes? To this day that man, as he now is, is footnoted in scientific journals, as nobody has ever superseded his work.

I know a girl who tamed a praying mantis. I first met Rosanna at the Sofala Cafe, which her parents own. Rosie, who is ten, sat beside me at a table in the cafe in her bottle-green school uniform, sucking a rainbow-coloured iceblock and said, ‘I found him on the windowsill. He was sitting there and he just started living with me. He started living on a vase of flowers on the kitchen table and then he just wouldn’t leave. So I called him Mate and I would share my breakfast with him. He really loved Weetbix. I’d get it on my fingers and I’d hold it up like this [she pointed her index finger down towards the table] and he’d just sip it from my finger. And he really liked arrowroot biscuits dunked in tea.’

‘How did he eat them, Rosie?’

‘Um—he just, I just got a bit of arrowroot on my finger and I’d hold it up and he’d [throwing her head backwards] go like that and eat it.’

‘How long did you have him?’

‘For a fair while, I can’t remember. Mum will know. Well, then I met Godzilla, she was a female praying mantis, and they mated. I didn’t see that. Then Godzilla ate Mate. I found wings and feelers and legs on the table, that’s how I knew. Then I found one more praying
mantis outside and another on my kitchen table. And Godzilla ate them as well. Then Godzilla laid some eggs. We’ve got a blind with a pelmet on the top and she laid them in between the blind and the pelmet. Then she came back down onto the vase of flowers and Mum saw her die. Mum said she just wound down like a clock. Her eyes, which were light green, changed to black when she was dying. Now we’ve got a nest and I’ll watch to see if they hatch.

‘Mate used to stroke me on the nose with his hand. He really knew me. We had a really big relationship. He was a really nice praying mantis and I was very upset when he was eaten. I knew it was nature and that’s how it had to be.’

My friend Laurel, who is Rosie’s grandmother, told me that you can tame a thrush. She also lives at Sofala and has an apple, pear, peach and apricot orchard. There are deep frosts in Sofala and Laurel said this morning, ‘As the sun comes up after a heavy frost it shines on the bare branches of the pear tree and it all glitters like diamonds. Sometimes the red and green king parrots perch in it and they look like ornaments on a Christmas tree. I stand there on my deck and revel in it.’

There were blue wrens pecking at the French windows as we sat by the fire this morning in her living room. Laurel said, ‘They are gathering spiders’ webs for their nests. And that one is becoming fixated on its
reflection. It thinks it’s another wren. It’s attacking it. You can hear its beak and it’s chirping at it.’ We sat and watched and then Laurel told me she had an elderly aunt who, as a girl sleeping on the verandah in the country, had tamed a thrush. ‘In the mornings it would come and perch on her pillow and run its beak through her hair. She had the most gorgeous hair, beautiful, chestnut, thick, curly hair.’

Lisa, who is Laurel’s daughter and Rosie’s mother, has inherited her great-aunt’s hair. She has the thickest, lush ringlets. Lisa gave me a recipe for one of the most popular desserts she makes in the cafe. Here is the recipe which she wrote by hand on a scrap of paper from Rosie’s exercise book:

Serves 4

¹
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cup of brandy

³
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cup of currants

80 grams of butter

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cup of caster sugar

3 eggs, beaten

1
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cups of self-raising flour

1 teaspoon of baking powder

2 large tablespoons of golden syrup

Method:

Soak currants in brandy, preferably overnight. Grease four dariole moulds or teacups. Cream together butter and sugar then add the beaten eggs and golden syrup. Fold in sifted flour and baking powder. Stir in currants and brandy. Divide the mixture between the moulds. Cover with foil, leaving a space at the top for rising to occur. Place the moulds in a baking dish half full of hot water. Bake at 180°C for about 45 minutes or until puffed and golden. Serve with a large dollop of whipped cream on top and drizzle generously with warmed golden syrup. The cream and syrup form a delicious caramel. Very popular in winter.

Here is the
Ailanthus
tree now in full leaf. A long drift of pink, red, cerise and white impatiens has flung itself the whole length of the garden. It is drowning a white, or perhaps it was a green, arum lily under the tree.

The geraniums in twenty pots are in full bloom. A burning red that it hurts to stare at, and also pink and white. They cover some cement paving by the lawn. I was never sure if I could dig up all that cement, so left it. When Dave (the tree man I hired to dig) pulled up the side drive of cement blocks, the sweat spun out
from his red face in silver drops, showing what hard work it was to dig this. (Why doesn’t this happen when women work?) He rolled the squares of cement onto steel pipes and manoeuvred them into position. Placing them tip to tip made the path I am so happy to have. It was a case of necessity being the mother of invention, leading us to use the blocks this way. There weren’t enough to make a curving path. Children love to run on this path, jumping from one diamond-shaped block to the next. Among them now, small blue Agathea daisies are blooming, stretching down, almost throttling the big creamy Edelweiss rose that flowered for five months in its first year. I love that rose. It’s so much better than Iceberg, as my friend Toni’s daughter, Sarah, said. How right she was. I’d never heard of it but got eight just in case, from Ross Roses at Port Willunga in South Australia, posted in sawdust.

A hot north wind is blowing. The garden is flattened. Foxgloves and poppy leaves are laid out, gasping. I went round with buckets of bathwater trying to revive the plants.

Earlier, in a fit of energy, and in spite of the heat, I decided to dig up two red geraniums by the side path as they are too bright there. Also a yellow-leafed pink-flowered
geranium was dug out. I dragged these in a bucket of water down near where the potatoes once grew in a neglected place, worn out from the trellis of potato vine falling in wind. The white dahlia that I’d meant to move weeks ago, before it grew too big, was dug out. It went outside the front gate, near the magnolia tree. Terry has a theory that the more that is planted there, the more normal it will look, and the plants will be less tempting to vandals. He has read research on it. I think there could be something in it. Once planted, I propped a newspaper over the dahlia to shade the wilting leaves. I would like to use a wet towel, but you and I know, from past experience that it would probably not be left there long.

And now, as I have been out to see, the paper is gone too, blown away, I suppose.

While I was standing there, pondering the lost newspaper, a young woman passing with a boy who was sucking a big red iceblock on a stick said, ‘Can I put my banana peel on your garden?’

I said, ‘Yes, please do.’

The woman, who seemed strange, disturbed, drunk or under some duress, then asked if I would go and fetch a cream labrador dog which she had found at the corner shop, looking lost, with a bite mark on its neck. She said the woman in the shop had given the dog a drink, but did not seem to care much that it looked lost.
As the dog was resting there and had water, there was nothing I could do to be useful, as the pound wasn’t open and I wasn’t going to give it a home. I told her I would see what has happened to the dog in the morning. All this from a white dahlia being moved.

A still, quiet, wet day. Misty rain. This will probably save the dahlia and those geraniums. This is the month of geraniums. There are dozens—pink, red, white, cerise, apricot and crimson. The crimson one is climbing up one side of the shed. It will meet the blue potato vine coming up the other side, over the roof and window. All I need now is some white potato vine to cover the roof of the shed and I’ll have a flag.

It is time to pull up the nasturtiums. They are waning, though still full of flowers. But if there is to be space for the cosmos seedlings, now almost ready to move from among the cornflowers, the nasturtiums must go. The cornflowers are in bloom. The stocks are full of flowers and the smell is at the gate. All that scent from a one-dollar packet of seeds from Bi-Lo. This place has a big seed stand and all packets are only a dollar each.

I am waiting for the moon to be in its right phase. Terry told me he is waiting a few more days before sowing. I can never remember if it is on a waning or a
waxing moon that seeds should go in. I will ask him again today.

Not much luck at all with our share-farming of the sweetcorn. I sowed two more batches, after the first Terry sowed came up so sparsely. But the last packet was a different kind, called Terrific, and I put in the whole lot. No point in sowing a few at a time to spread the harvest when so few sprout.

The beans are a puzzle too. The first sowing of dwarf French beans are doing well, leafy, the length of a hand in height, but none of the next two lots came up. What is the matter? Terry said his friends have had no luck with seeds this year. I read a long article in the
Henry Doubleday Newsletter
on seeds. Now, staring at the bare earth, I think of the turmoil below: the breaking of the seed case, the sprout and then the death. For three weeks, whenever I have been home, I have gone to stare at the earth two or three times a day, anxious as a war bride waiting for a ship.

Now that the new moon has come, I had a long talk to Terry on the method of planting by phases of the moon. I came away a bit wiser, but also confused. He said it is best to plant seeds of root vegetables on the waning moon, and to plant those whose leaves we eat on the
waxing one. As if the moon were to pull down the root vegetables and draw up the leaf vegetables. But what then of flowers? I suppose it is on the waxing moon they get planted, and the same for grain.

Our share-farmed sweetcorn definitely went in on the wrong phase and must be why it has been poor, because the third lot are up and thriving—there are now about fifty plants. But they will be overwhelmed by the six or so that grew from the first sowing. I must move the smaller ones. And is it worth it? Well, it is for the moment, because I am intrigued. How long this will last, I don’t know. There is always a limit to my ardour. It is more like a wave of the sea than a mountain. Ephemeral but ruthless.

Children are coming so I’m making another of Belinda Jeffery’s recipes.

60 grams of butter, melted and cooled until lukewarm

1 cup of milk

1
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cups of creamed corn

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cup of corn kernels

2 eggs, beaten

1 teaspoon of curry powder

1
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cups of plain flour

2 teaspoons of fresh baking powder

pinch of salt

olive oil or vegetable oil

For the sauce:

2 tablespoons of olive oil

2 large onions, chopped

1 heaped tablespoon of curry powder

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

2
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teaspoons of grated fresh ginger

3 teaspoons of turmeric

2 teaspoons of ground cumin

2 tablespoons of sugar

1 x 800 gram can of diced tomatoes with its liquid

salt and pepper

Method for the sauce:

Heat the oil in a large pan. Add the onion and cook until soft. Stir in garlic, ginger and spices. Add the sugar and tomatoes. Simmer for ten minutes, stirring, until thickened. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Method for fritters:

Heat oven to 100°C. Mix together the butter, milk, creamed corn and corn kernels. Add the eggs and curry powder. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into the mixture. Mix and leave to sit for 30 minutes. The longer it is left the lighter the fritters will be.

Heat the oil in a pan. Drop in tablespoons of the corn mixture. Leave some space between them as they will spread. Cook until golden on the base and bubbles appear on the top. Turn and cook the same on the other side. Place in the oven on a plate lined with kitchen paper to keep warm until all fritters are cooked.

Serve with the sauce and sour cream and lemon or lime wedges with parsley. Belinda says they can also be made very small with a dollop of sour cream on top with smoked salmon for a party.