I have terrible taste in music. I feel ashamed to admit it, but I’m just not that into it.
It seems like a universally human thing, enjoying music – if you look at anyone’s list of interests, it is bound to appear. I can enjoy a catchy song as much as anyone, but my tastes are very ‘top 20 popular’, and no-one’s ever going to hear about a great new band from me.
But as bad as my music tastes are, I like to think that P’s are worse. His preferences don’t seem to have progressed past the 90s, and the worst thing of all is that he still loves Guns ‘N’ Roses.
I detest a few things in life, like ironing, dental work and getting out of bed on cold mornings, but I think most things are preferable to listening to Axel Rose belt out “Sweet child of mine”. And yet P loves it.
He loves me too – doesn’t do much for the ego, that.
This weekend in Sydney was lovely. It might just be the last hurrah of warm weather, and I still hadn’t planted the garlic. The front yard was also looking a little shabby after being neglected over Easter, so we got stuck into the mowing, edging, tidying and weeding.
I finally planted the onions. I had sown a whole packet of onion seeds in a large pot, and they had progressed to about 15cm high and strong enough for transplanting. I prepared Bed B by weeding and cultivating thoroughly, then set to work trimming the roots of the onions to 2cm long, trimming the tops if they were particularly long, and planting at 10cm spacings with 20cm row spacings. Perhaps a little close, but we’ll see how it goes. This certainly isn’t going to be a project with a rapid payoff, seeing as I’m planting onions in close to full shade through winter. If I get pickling size onions, I’ll still be happy.
I had enough onion seedlings to fill about 1/2 of the bed. The rest I will plant with beetroot, as I’ve had success with beetroot in shade before, and I could use a large quantity of baby beets for pickling.
After planting the onions I mulched heavily with lucerne in an attempt to deter the pesky neighbourhood cat from digging up my seedlings. I have been having dreadful trouble after I stripped the beds for winter – the cat seems to love digging and pooping in bare soil. Heavily mulched beds seemed to have escaped. Mulching around tiny seedlings is slow work, and afterwards I was well and truly pooped.
Today I managed to plant the garlic. Only 50 cloves this year , and I chose to plant only the biggest outer cloves rather than entire bulbs. I think it was a mistake last year to plant the small inner ones too – I had quite a number of small, fiddly bulbs as a result.
Once again I’ve planted under the roses (which may be a mistake) but I’ve re-used garlic grown last year too, so I might generally be heading for failure.
But first I’m heading for bed. I have sore muscles on top of my sore muscles, a raging chest infection and I’m the size of a small house. I know it’ll be difficult once the baby arrives, but at the moment I’d just love to be my normal size again.
*or garlic. Seeing as I planted it under the roses, that might be more apt.
500m2 in Sydney 