Time to stop and smell the flowers. Or at least to pause and weed them... By the time most of us see a potato, it is in a grocery store, and bears with it no vestiges of the leaves and flowers that produced it.
So here we are, expanding your education, with a photo of a very lovely potato blossom.
Back in the 1920's, when Bondi was still primarily a producing farm, there were 130 rows of potatoes running from the house down to the lake. Grandmother Elizabeth Tapley, in a long skirt and wide brimmed hat, hand picked the potato beetles that compete to eat the leaves.
Grandfather noted casually in his diary, in very late August of one year, that she had finally finished picking beetles. That was a back breaking task, to be sure. We have less rows of potatoes these days, but occasionally it feels like we still have endless beetles to remove in our organic garden!
There is something soothing about working in a garden. We have had lily beetles. The bugs are happy with wet, cool temperatures this year. I cannot imagine your place as a farm. Lovely to go back in time. It is important to change, though.
ReplyDeletechange can be good, but celebrating and honouring where we've come from is good too.
ReplyDeleteI'm working on a play about my grandparents, so I'm immersed in our family history.