Asleep at the wheel

Here in the inner-city, where jets roar overhead far too often, trucks thunder by busily and young men suffering repeated hormone surges just make loud mechanical noises for the sheer, irritating hell of it late into the night, I could never really say things are quiet around here. But they are.

Out in Amateur Land that is – our garden – it's so quiet you can hear the lettuce growing. Everything else seems in a state of near suspended animation. There's not a lot to do, other than enjoy the flowers and the pretty view. Friends often laugh that I'm an over-enthusiastic glutton for punishment when it comes to both cooking and gardening, but even I have my lazy limits. With nothing much to do in the garden right now, I'm sensibly electing to do very little out there, too, other than the morning rounds of watering. Apart from that, this blog is mostly about nothing.

Shhh! Everything's sleeping right now. Nodding heads dozing off. Even the lizards are feeling lazy.

Over in the hospital ward the sick grevillea has been given its discharge papers, although the steady stream of visiting honeyeaters have attested to its good health for weeks now.

Down in the creche the baby curry tree seeds have produced bambinos. The healthiest of these three will go to a friend's new garden, which is temptingly bare, bereft of anything edible, flowering or interesting. It's just lawn at the moment, but I have a cunning plan for their garden, all of which will come from seeds and cuttings.

And across the path, in the former alyssum patch, neatly modest rows of spinach and radicchio, plus a lolly scramble of olive-leaf rocket seeds (a new variety I'm testing out) have all got off to a good start. But apart from that nothing much is happening, nothing much at all.

There's a lovely segment on a radio show here in Sydney which is called 'Nothing'. It's on for half an hour or so every week, and in it, you can call up and talk about nothing at all if you like, because the segment is about nothing. Every now and then they broadcast a pregnant pause because the announcer has nothing to say, but then someone ruins it all by calling in and raising a bit of a nothing topic. I don't listen to it all the time, but it's kind of comforting to know that it exists, purely as an antidote to all the other pap on the airwaves.

Oddly enough, in the time it's taken me to write this little post about nothing much at all, it has occurred to me that I could do a post fairly soon about organic gardening ideas that have been milling about on the crowded platform of my mind, and I could also do a little blog soon about all the interesting spider webs which have sprung up here recently. And as I write this blog I am cooking up another batch of home-made vegetable stock in my kitchen. In fact I've got a bee in my bonnet about making stocks lately, too. So even though there's nothing much happening in the garden, I have resolved to launch several missiles of packaged nothingness into the blogosphere over the next few days. Maybe after that I might have some gardening events to blog about, but then again, maybe not.