The best of us

The poppy through pigeon netting

I wake up and think first about sunflowers I've repotted, if I should have put fleece back over the seeds because it's been so cold. 

Yesterday, potting on calendula, the healing flower, I was thinking about Helen, my old school friend who died last month. She had hair the colour of those marigolds. 

It is a cliche to associate the allotment with release but I'm happy now with cliche. 

Actually the greatest release is from place claiming. It was purgative, freeing swathes of my front garden last week of ground elder, but what comes back like those bits of root is people staking claims on things. It becomes so distracting and interrupts better thoughts. I've left social media (well most of it apart from the one defining itself with the metaphor of a chain) so how do I stop feeling irritated with the world, with strangers who mean nothing to me?

I plant out mizuma, pak choi, telegraph peas and lettuce, I thank Jeanette for her gift of tomato and chilli plants, I joke with Dave about goji berries and when I do this, the only things jostling are weeds and vegetables. This helps. 

Violets
in the herb patch

I watch a long worm, feel how dry the soil is.....and when plants I put outside are scorched from a late frost, when I see first earlies showing and hope mice won't get beans I've sown in the greenhouse, I think of Emily Dickinson's, It will be summer - eventually. So with the earth moving on its axis because of climate change, I know I'm better off among billions whose focus is on growing vegetables, herbs, flowers - put to better work on the vocabularies, metaphors and rhythms of soil. 

And it's the time of year when the birds are everywhere with their beaks full of worms, there are queues on Wilson Avenue because the racing's started again, the foxes are busy at night and it's best really, if there's a top ten list of worries, to be concerned about the pea seedlings and whether the frost has had them, or slugs.