Harvest time

This blog post is sadly way over due. Other things, like finishing my thesis, got in the way. And now this blog serves as a procrastination tactic so that I can avoid fixing the reviewers comments on a paper that was rejected.

With great intentions of feeding the house-hold, and possibly neighbours, with products from the garden, I bravely planted a collection of vegetable seeds early last spring. The sprouting went very well and even the self-sown cherry tomatoes promised a delivery of hundreds of juicy blobs.

The variability of rainfall meant that these poor germinants were subjected to either too little rain - I did my best to water them regularly - or too much - followed by some mildew-y type infection of all the squashes. A handful of really baby marrows and six marrow flowers were all that I could scavenge before the mildew took over. The rocket grew too fast to harvest at it's peppery, non-bitter best. The spinach went to seed in the blink of an eye. The carrots on the other hand took months to deliver tiny little snacks. I suspected, that tallied up my harvest would look something like this:



(By Andre Jordan via www.awaytogarden.com)

In many ways the harvest was barely enough for a dinner for two. And just when I thought the harvest was over, the pumpkins delivered! Hidden in among the mass of vines and decorative garden plants was the growing pumpkin harvest. At first it looked like three good sized squashes, but when the mass of vines started to dry out and look the worst for wear and the pumpkins weren't getting any bigger themselves, it was time to haul them out of the garden. What a bounty it was!



Now nearly everything has pumpkin in it. It started with cookies, gnocchi and a veggie side with dinner. Next is soup, fritters and maybe muffins. Growing pumpkins may just be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. I'll grow them again come spring time.

Christmas cards, tweets and squeaks

How will you be sending Christmas wishes this year?



From: Over the Hedge, 1 December 2009

Thanks to BA.com and Charlie R.

... for the upgrade to BA club class on the way out from Johannesburg to London Heathrow. What a way to fly: real comfort, real sleep, real cutlery, real food, real service.

I also have reason to believe that I sat in the same seat that KP - if you're an England / South African cricket fan who'll know who he is - sat in on his way out for the current series. Ooooh *faint*! (no not really, he plays for the other side).

Sadly on the way back from Heathrow everyone who paid for the Club seats showed up and I had to manage in World Traveller, not unlike a long tube (London Underground) ride! Noisy and a lot more squishy. Seriously though BA rocks! Travel with them if you can.

I recognise this situation.

I wonder if my family, friends and students hold back when I start spouting off about biology.

When is father's day, not father's day.

Today, 9th June 2009, is a special kind of father's day for us.

Let me tell you something about our dad. He loved travelling around South Africa in our caravan. He loved travelling to wild places specifically. He loved, before our home suburb developed, cranking the volume on the 1812 overture on the record player and walking down to the spruit and just listening (much to the chagrin of our older siblings). He loved Woodland Kingfishers and Brown Snake Eagles. Once he retired he loved flannel shirts. And he had the biggest collection of boring corporate ties that I've ever seen. He loved my mom's quilting hobby and he loved taking these works of art as the requisite blanket on picnics or to lie on underneath the fig trees on the banks of the Sabie river.

Mom kept his ties and flannel shirts when we cleaned out his wardrobe after he died. She always knew she wanted to do something special with these items. She finished this work of art over the last few months.


It's a picnic blanket, so we don't have to use the bed quilts on damp, squidgy and weedy grass on all future picnics. It's made from his flannel shirts (the green flannel is extra) and bound in his ties. The quilt pattern is called "Snails trail" and this too has significance. Dad was house-bound on oxygen for the last few years of his life. From the oxygen concentrating machine he had a long "trail" of translucent pipe to his cannula... just like a trail left behind by a snail. That's how we'd track him down in the house if he wasn't in the bedroom. Mom called the quilt: "Ties that bind" - holding the quilt together.




You'll notice the dirt on the label. That's cos we broke the quilt in at our church's recent potjiekos competition.

Pretty artistic way of remembering Dad. Eleven years today that he's been out of our physical presence, but always with us. Even now when we go on picnics. Even more so when we hear the call of the Woodland Kingfisher: a loud trilling song, kri-trrrrrrr descending and fading.

Reader or writer, intent and response

Extended families can be rich in the dramatic. Especially if the lines of communicating are not equal in all directions, which is probably never likely. A recent family drama turned out to be a storm in a tea-cup. These are my words describing my perception. Some other family members are probably still licking their wounds. All about a status message on a popular social networking site.

This again got me pondering the accuracy of social networking statuses. In the past this pondering has been confined to my head - is it brave to post this here considering the repercussions? Can they, SN statuses, in all honesty, be an accurate reflection of a writer's mental state? I presuppose that the meaning of my communication is in the response I elicit, from those I communicate with. Getting an overwhelmingly concerned response from friends and family in response to a status update warrants questioning of the writer's intent. If attention is what you seek, then you'll get that, possibly different to what you intended.

So when dramatic and concerning statuses find their way into social networking reality and the response is equally dramatic (Newton's law: for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction) - does the reader's response match the writer's intent? And how seriously should we take any future social networking statuses?

With concern and apologies to the family for hanging our laundry out in the open.