Growing your own Vegetables;

Never has it been more tempting than now to grow your own vegetables, breed and kill your own chickens, and be self-sufficient in food. The world is getting so edgy; you just never know where the next crisis might come from. Daily bombings around the world with constitutions being re-written and our politicians are seething with discontent. On the television we get a steady diet of cooking shows interspersed with more bombings and massacres. It seems the only way forward now is  growing your own food with taking out a good solid funeral plan with the White Ladies Funeral’s phone number firmly stuck on the fridge door with the help of a magnet, or… be sunk knee deep in gloom forever..

We bravely prepare ourselves, get a solid pair of gardening gloves and take ourselves to the large Home and Garden place which always seems to be situated somewhere on the edge of the suburb where we live or on some major highway to another city. We have set our mind on starting off with punnets of crispy cos lettuce seedlings, the same as we have seen the previous night with a Chinese lady crunching the fully grown cos in salad bowl and then adding a dressing made from some balsamic vinegar, palm sugar and some shredded coconut. The addition of slices of red Spanish onion adds both colour and taste.

This Oriental lady seems to enjoy cooking enormously and finds it terribly funny because she just never stops laughing, does she? Even the breaking of an egg in a bowl starts her off in spasm of unstoppable mirth and merriment. If that’s what cooking makes us into, let me go for it. I am jealous of her bountiful cheerfulness. Ling Poh has won my heart forever.

As I enter the punnets division at Homes and Garden I am smiling widely and even laugh when I pay at the cash register. I have bought twenty four seedlings of cos and twelve of beetroot together with three bags of soil and one bag of ‘well rotted’ cow manure. I load the lot up in one of their very low slung trolleys ready to go to the car park. It is a difficult trolley that seems to want to turn around when I push it. I noticed one keen female gardener with 5 bags of soil dragging the trolley behind her giving the obstinate trolley no option to change direction or go south. I follow her determinately while not forgetting to keep my laughing up.

Of course, there are also gardening shows on TV. One features a terribly enthusiastic gardener who, if he stood still long enough, could easily be taken for a gnome. I forgot his name but he is rather short and has a kind of Karl Marx beard, and you half expect him to eat a handful of soil, that’s how he enthuses about anything that grows. Of course, the patron of all gardening shows is the man with the Yorkshire accent who till recently when he retired, was featured weekly on the ABC gardening.

I drove home and filled my special anti-rot arsenic infused pine timber gardening box with soil and planted the cos and beetroot. I am getting hungry already and I will be so agonizingly healthy. But, I am still smiling!

Please sign and stop the  slaughter by guns;

http://www.change.org/petitions/international-court-of-justice-at-the-hague-bring-the-us-pro-gun-senators-to-justice