Working from home...

...is sometimes wonderful. Like when your lunch is silverbeet fresh from the garden with mushrooms, olives, cannellini beans and a squeeze of lemon juice on sourdough toast:


mmmmm.

... sometimes messes with your head. I spent so long staring at our lettuces during my morning coffee that I started to see ballet dancers.
This:


Started to look a bit like this:


(except my lettuces have their arms folded around their shoulders, not stretched out in front)

This:


Started to look a bit like the male lead here:


(except my lettuce is being more dramatic and yearning and is bending at the waist)

...and it sometimes leaves you to be the person left at home to discover that the two mysteries of our household

- where has the brush for the dust pan gone?

- why does our weird laundry/annexe room smell so disgusting?

can be answered in one fell swoop:

Because the brush fell down some odd, until-now-unknown open drain hole behind a cupboard and caught anything from any of our household sinks in the last month or two in its bristles. It was foul.

Ballet photographs by Andrew Bossi.

You think you know someone, but then

Take my nice succulent here:


Nice, squat little succulent.
And then one day it suddenly hits something like adolescence.
It gets all leggy.

And starts brandishing brightly coloured make-up around.


Next thing I know I'll be driving it home from parties in a car that smells like a brewery while it tries to enunciate each word very clearly as proof that it's not under the influence.

Elsewhere in the garden, suddenly the Spoon Lilies decided to flower this year, and now have bright red fruit too. (Their leaves are the ones in the header - they're one of the only things that reliably grows in our garden other than weeds. Seems a strange choice on their behalf given that they're native to warm, tropical areas, which is so far from Melbourne right now!)



And my vegie patch is putting in a valiant effort at growth.


Poor plants barely stand a chance against the aphid infestation, crap soil which the plane tree in front of our house constantly sends fibrous roots up into, and wan sunlight.

A passerby said to me the other day 'I always admire your garden, it's so fantastic what you're doing'
'Are you kidding me?' I asked, 'It's totally infested with caterpillars and aphids!'
'But at least you're trying' she answered.
And even if it's not as produce-filled as all the gardens of so many other bloggers, at least I know many more people in my local community now because they stop for a chat while I'm out the front gardening and ask about my vegie patch, and talk about their vegie patch, or the vegie patch they're thinking of starting. (One guy told me that they'd converted an unused laneway into a vegie garden, but I've looked high and low for it, almost to the point of trespass, and I can't find it.) So if nothing else, maybe it's inspiration for others to consider planting vegies in their front garden. I think they probably look at mine and think 'No matter how bad mine is, it's at least going to be better than that!'