FINDING YOUR SANITY
We’re all stressed by COVID-19, but that doesn’t mean a trip to the rubber room …… yet …
Mum and I are keen gardeners and puzzlers, while Ol’ 76 is a mad inventor, so we have things to keep us sane during these stressful times. Of course, mad inventors require such things as chemicals and laboratory items to keep them and the pudding factory (brain) operating, gardeners need seeds, seedlings and garden beds, and puzzlers need brain fodder. Thankfully, chemicals and laboratory items can be delivered from anywhere in the country, providing neither are related to the current production of medical inventory to fight the pandemic. Puzzle magazines and books seemed to suffer a slight hiatus in the first couple of weeks of COVID-19 arriving on our shores, but that appears to have righted itself. Oddly enough, the gardening issue has proved the most problematic as a result of the panic buying, and it’s not showing any signs of easing up. It means that winter vegetable seedlings, seeds and seed raising soil are in very short supply, and it has totally upset our standard autumn planting routine – much to Elbit’s chagrin.
Before COVID-19, I’d had a good summer potato crop and had no plans to plant any seed potatoes because the bed floods in winter. Likewise with the brassicas, which failed dismally when the veggie patch turned into a hellish morass last winter and put me in a bad mood for weeks. I’d toyed with the thought of container gardening, but I was still in tomato and capsicum harvesting mode and put it on the to-do-list. By the time we finally decided to go ahead with container gardening, we were a little late in finding the requisite seedlings and seeds, and the past few weeks have turned into a continuous (and fruitless) veggie treasure hunt. I’ve now reached the point whereby a limp, sickly looking cauliflower seedling would be better than nothing, but there is nothing available in stores – seedlings or seeds, that is. Thankfully, Mum and I had some partly used seed packets, and we’d even managed to score a few heritage seeds from the local farmer’s market a few months back, so at least we had something to plant. We also had a large number of containers, a trailer load of mushroom compost, a nice sunny spot free of dogs, and the impetus to finally get things moving. We shovelled, filled, planted and watered and thoroughly enjoyed it, which was stress-relieving and satisfying. Now, the hard work begins as we face the inevitable garden pests.
I have found throughout my life that enjoying any particular pursuit involves the law of physics that dictates, for each and every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In gardening, there is no doubt that it applies to garden pests, and here in the country we have plenty of them. Ol’ 76 is not a keen gardener, but he loves our garden and knows every garden-destroying pest by name. His favourite bugbear is the grass parrot and most of its brightly coloured relations, as they have a tendency to land on a rose bush and snip off the flowers for no particular reason. The pointlessness of it sends him wild, and every time it happens, Mum and I are forced to listen to a five minute diatribe on what useless birds they are. They can also strip a laden 40 foot high plum tree in a matter of a few hours, which also sends him more than a touch mad – especially as he was planning to bottle plums in brandy this summer. The dogs also have the capacity to madden him when they do absolutely nothing about the parrots, or the corellas that like to raid my tomato patch. Oddly, they seem to tolerate most of the native birds here … apart from the magpies. For some reason, the greyhound and the magpie are mortal enemies, and the magpies take great delight in landing just out of reach and taunting their four-legged nemeses. Thus, we have a situation that at times involves Ol’ 76 complaining loudly as he spots a parrot snip off yet another rose, while the dogs stand at the fence barking madly at a magpie perched cheekily on the roof. To cap it all off, one of our dogs has particularly astringent wee, and once she has seen off the magpie, she twinkles on the lawn and goes back indoors. That leaves Ol’ 76 to rush for the hose and furiously water the patch the dog has wet before it kills his precious lawn. Our own reality TV is far more interesting than anything currently on offer during prime-time!
Meanwhile, my least favourite pests are snails and slugs, which love my veggies and dine-in often. I don’t like using snail bait, so last year I opted for the beer solution, wherein you place a saucer of beer down and the little varmints are supposed to ignore the veggies, drink the beer and stagger home drunk. While it works for a number of the locals in our town, our snails and slugs appear far more impervious. They’re either teetotal or picky about their beer brands, as I lost all of my cucumbers in a night and the beer remained untouched. This year, I’ve reverted to snail pellets, as what we’re doing throughout the COVID-19 emergency is akin to digging for victory, and I’m taking no prisoners. My greatest fear is coming out to the garden one morning to find snails and slugs have had a midnight snack, while parrots and magpies descend to set off the dogs and Ol’ 76 – I’ve a feeling it will be contest between us to see who’s carted off to the rubber room first! The most benign pursuit can therefore have its own stresses (even writing), and picking your way through that minefield is sometimes difficult. I suspect that during this crisis, many folk will decide to take up a new hobby, follow a dream, go online to become more educated or look to spend more time outdoors in the garden. Should they take up the latter as a course of stress relief, I highly recommend they equip themselves with an arsenal that includes bird scarers, snail and slug pellets, beer for personal (and not gastropod) ingestion, dogs with non-astringent wee, a swag of bird netting for every fruit tree in the garden, and a decade’s supply of every seed you might one day want to plant in case we have to face a pandemic such as this again. Then, and only then, will sanity become tangible!
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Elbit vs. COVID-19 