Categories for Gardening

Today i walked up to the garden to empty my compost bucket. Only for the last five years, since i work in the gardens, i have been collecting my kitchen cuttings and brought them to the gardens compost areas. I love this process.

The benefits of compost include providing nutrients as fertilizer to the crop, acting as soil conditioner, increasing the humus or humic acids content of the soil, and introducing beneficial colonies of microbes in the soil, which help in suppressing pathogens. The natural interaction of the soil, plant roots and nutrient / microorganisms of compost improves the soil structure. An improved soil structure will increase the soil water retention ability and control soil erosion. Compost can be used for land and stream reclamation, wetland construction and landfill cover.

I know some schools still go to school gardens to teach the pupils something about plants, veggies and fruits. I hope one day composting will be an area where pupils learn the basic principles of. I hope one day composting will be completely normal and something you just do, wherever you live, in a big city or a small town or somewhere completely rural. It still stuns me i have lived for fifty years on this planet without knowing anything about this.

Last Friday i went to the garden the Vredestuin to make photographs. I took my camera with me. I enjoy photographing with it. The zoom lens is great. Especially all the plants and flowers are good close up. While i was there i realized i enjoyed myself. So today, Sunday, i went again. It has been a couple of months since i actually worked in the garden. But, i confess, today my main job was to clean the kitchen. Clean up the stove, order the cupboards, set back all the teacups, sweep the floor, clean up the kitchen counter.

It was lovely!

Feeling a bit grumpy today. I did go to the garden this afternoon. It was quite busy. It did fall to me to try to spread everybody out and divide the jobs in a good way. I must say, a day like this made me feel happy i do not do this work the whole time. Very tiresome. Once in a while is good though.

I will move to a new room next week. I decided that today. Happy with that. Loosing the grumpiness a bit now.

Wednesday morning i worked on a new video page for ellenpronk.com. I spend most of the time crying. Not out of sadness, no, more out of emotion. It has been a while since i have seen this videos, and they really touched me. I remember filming them with my iPhone or camera, editing them, combining them with the music i had chosen for each. I see the growth in each one of them. Happy i am working on these pages. Good i see the possibility to make the content of this website a bit more open.

Over the past months during talks in the gardens i mentioned an article posted in the Guardian: Architects hope to tear down garden fences of England’s future homes. Architects searching for a new way to have a garden, away from the private ones going to communal gardens.

Patrick Usborne, the director of Perpendicular, which oversaw another winning entry using wood panels made from British-only timber, said: “There’s an English perception that owning your castle needs its own land. But if we are to improve community cohesion we need to remove the ubiquitous rear garden and bring together external spaces for the community.”

This idea speaks to me. While i sit in my room i watch outside and see the small private gardens with the hedges and little grassy areas and small sheds. What if this was a communal area with an area for children to play in, a few vegetable beds for growing your own tomatoes, beans and cabbage, an area where you can barbecue with friends or family, a few flower areas with benches where you can sit on your own and read a book.

Even in this article the forces opposing this new direction are strong.

But entrants fear their designs will be resisted by builders determined to stick with existing blueprints for homes. Volume housebuilders are poised to erect hundreds of thousands of new homes to their standard designs on greenfield sites under planning changes announced earlier this month.

I think in the Netherlands there are already new ideas being developed. But most of the houses built are of the same blueprint. What if you want a shared garden space, a house with separate rooms for people living by themselves, houses for families with young children, smaller houses for older people. What if you want to use an app to reserve space in the garden for a certain day. What if you want to share the space outside with other people, and not have your own little tiled house extension.

I love this idea. Hopefully this will be put to good use in the near future.