June garden - slowly does it

Sunday, 4th of June 2023 [71]

I can’t believe it’s June already! Spring was taking a very long time to show up in full swing here, but once it did it went straight into summer.

I was looking outside my kitchen window for months. At my overgrown lawn. At my falling fence. At the general mess out there and cold weather was my excuse not to go there and clean it up.

Now that the weather is super nice and sunny I have no more excuses not to do gardening… except I do. My body decided to manifest some freaky allergies and it came together with sunny weather and little bursts of gardening I started doing.

I have a good reason to think that outside has something to do with my new allergy. Mainly because it calms down when I’m at work, but also the timing of it all. I’m also trying to analyse what I did and didn’t do before this started and one habit that I paused a few weeks ago is adding honey to my tea. I actually stopped drinking tea alltogether and replaced it with water, but since today I decided to reintroduce honey into my diet.

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I know, honey is mainly sugar, but it also has many enzymes and general goodness and I remembering reading that eating honey and/or bee pollen can be very helpful with allergies if indeed they are caused by the pollen.

I’m not sure whether this can work or not, but since antihistamines don’t really do much at all, I have to try other things. Gardening has been for years my source of joy and I can not stop doing it just because some hives decided to show allover my body.

For the time being though, my gardening is on pause. I still do a little, but a little is a cery good description of what I do. I go outside and trim the lawn a little and put cuttings to one side. Next day I do a little more and/or collect the cuttings in the garden bag.

It probably took me around 2 weeks to do bith sides of my back garden. Then another flare-up happened and I stopped again. New pile of cuttings is waiting to be collected, but neither yesterday not today, despite the amazing weather I didn’t go there even to collect it. This time I got caught by one of the stinging nettles and my thumb swell so bad, I couldn’t move it.

I miss the days when I was out in the garden, healing my soul and not wondering whether this or that can cause me to swell like a ballon. In life we take everything for granted and only when things/people we love are no longer available we cry in despair.

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Recently I have been having lots of realisations of such things and the dominating emotion that accompanies me these days is grief and regrets. So many regrets. Some things and people I let go of or took for granted are no longer available, while others with some work can still be fixed I believe.

Earlier this week I called my allotment neighbour to see when she’s going to her allotment, so I can pick my some of the tools from the allotment I lost this year. I didn’t pay attention, I assumed it will always be there and that’s how I missed the rent payment for it and lost it.

Angie, my allotment neighbout has managed to recover some of my tools, so I meet up with her on Friday evening to pick them up.

The allotment is gone, but what I really wanted to recover was the ending tool. That shiny half moon thing on the right of the picture above.

Apart from it being of high quality, not really seen around these days, it has a sentimental value. I got this tool from my brother and it reminded me of him.

That’s how we get to another regret of mine’s. I had a silly argument with my brother around 3 years ago and we haven’t talked since. This time of the year he would come over with his family. We would have a bbq and sometimes they stayed over night and other time I would go visit them in Oxford.

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Silly argument and all this ceased to exist. I sent him xmas and bday texts, but he never replies. Maybe he changed the number, who knows? A couple months ago however my niece reached out to me on whatsapp to ask if she can come visit me one day. I said of course she can and was hoping that at some point my brother will show up at my door step like old good times, but it hasn’t materialised yet.

Today I decided it was time to reach out. I should have really thought of it at the beginning of the weekend, so we have chance to plan something, but I guess I needed more misery to be pushed to the point that I messaged my niece. I asked when she’s coming to visit me and we’ve been chatting for a little while now.

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I’m not sure what will come out of it, but I know that I don’t want no more regrets. I miss my brother and his family. That’t the only blood family I have in this country, except my chosen family - my friends.

And while I have an amazing bunch of friends, I really, really miss my brother and I hope I can reconnect with him soon.

My pots of wild strawberries are doing well in this lovely weather and I can imagine Kaja’s happiness when she picks them up straight from the bush.

From a very young age I have been teaching her about gardening and I’m sure her mum continues with what I started, as I infected her with love for orchids and for gardneing too, but 3 years is a long time in a life of a child and I feel pretty stupid that I let a silly agrument with my brother separate us for this long.

His birthday is next month and this year I don’t want to be sending bday messages that may or may not be received. I want to give him a big hug and celebrate his birthday with him, like I used to.

And here we are again… I can never stick to just one topic. It was meant to be my #gardenjournal update for June and it changed into reflections about my life and regrets I have. Somehow it always goes like this.

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I guess it’s justified, cause I’m not really doing much in my garden these days. I haven’t planted a single seed. I guess some late flowers could still be started from seeds, but my mind has just not been on the garden these days.

Luckily my work from previous years has not gone to waste and I still have some plants and fruit bushes growing in my garden.

Like the blueberries for example. I had one of those bushes for years. It was planted directly in the ground and while I knew in needs slightly acidic soil, I though watering it with my leftover coffee grounds was enough.

Well, it wasn’t. I think out of 6-7 years that I had it, it only produced fruits once. Last year I read that blueberries like to grow in couples, so I purched another blueberry bush while on holiday in Poland and I dug up the first one and planted both in big pots of acidic soil.

Would you look at that. Both of them started growing really fast and in just one season the size of both trippled abd finally I had some flowers and fruits last year.

This year I forgot to capture them when they were both in bloom. It was quite a spectacle and it looks like I’m gonna enjoy many more blueberry fruits this year.

My biggest wish is that my brother and his family will come to enjoy these fruits with me this year. Cause without family it’s quite a lonely life.

Until next time 💙

Camera:	iPhone11
Photographer:	@fantagira