Green Thumb

About three weeks ago, this thing was a seed:



Terrifying, no?  It is to me anyway.   Bean plants shoot up so fast, it's almost alien-like.  The directions on the package said not to put them in the ground until May, but this is doing so well I'll probably have beans by May.

I've been happily getting my urban farm going.  I started everything indoors on trays in peat pots and cardboard egg crates in early March, and slowly acclimatized them to outdoors on sunny days.



Pretty much everything has peeped up through the soil and is thriving.  Dozens of tomatoes, lettuce, kale, herbs.  I think I started the cukes too early as they never materialized, but I had good luck with everything else.





The radishes erupted with such an alarming ferocity that I was sure an errant squirrel had disturbed the soil.



They broke through so fast, they pushed the top layer of soil out of the pot.  I have created a monster.



I have many more tomato seedlings than I have space for mature plants.  As soon as the seedlings get a bit bigger, I'll be giving them away.  If anyone in the London area would like some free heirloom tomato seedlings, please let me know.  So far I have Black Krim, Bradywines and a couple varieties of cherry tomatoes that will need a new home soon.





I also planted some honeybee-friendly flowers.  Apparently, there are lots of beekeepers in the city, but not a whole lot of food for the bees, meaning they have to travel quite far to find food now.  They are encouraging people to plant more flowers for bee food, which I am happy to comply since they will be quite helpful pollinating the tomatoes once they flower as well.

I've been getting a nice stash of plant containers, mostly found items and giveaways.  It would be nice to have some raised beds, but I'm not that invested in a rental.  My nomadic hunter-gather lifestyle probably isn't suitable for farming anyway.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Oh!  A stroke of genius I had.  As I was browsing the seed packet aisles at the local garden centre, an idea formed in my brain, which resulted in a bit of mud underneath my fingernails and an urgency to get to early summer faster than the tilt of the earth possibly allows.  I planted my first-ever cocktail garden!  A garden to garnish and muddle and imbibe in.

Flowers are pretty and nice and good for the bees (I planted some of those as well) but I have always preferred growing things to eat.  It’s always fresher and better when it’s from the garden, and once you’ve had your own heirloom tomatoes, you will forego all others.  

Herbs are the most practical things to grow, as how many times have I bought a whole bunch of parsley or dill, only to use a chopped teaspoon as a garnish, and then finding the rest of the bunch in a sad state in the back of the fridge on the next clean-out.  It’s nice to have an herb garden to just get a handful here and there, it makes things smell nice, and it inspires you to whip something up summery and happy, something that the memory of will get you through another dark winter.

So, what exactly have I planted so far?   

Here’s the list.  It's ambitious.   Mint, rosemary, basil, thyme, tarragon, cilantro, parsley and lavender.  I’ve got a batch of cukes in as well, as you can’t have a pimms without them, and they are also lovely muddled in some gin and tonic, and I’ve had good luck making quick pickles with them that go perfectly on a bowl of summery soba noodles.  I’ve also got some kale and tomatoes that happily taking root in some peat pots that I got at the £ store.  The kale pops its green heads up amazingly fast; it took about 5 days for them to appear en masse, while the tomatoes had me worried and took more like 10 days for one or two to tentatively peek out from the compost.  

I have everything on trays with a greenhouse cover- it goes out in the morning if it’s going to be a warm day out; otherwise the seedlings spend the day in the sunniest windowsill I have.  I bring them in at night, as you still need a winter coat at night and the temperature hovered right above freezing a couple of days last week.  I accidentally left a flat of lettuce out overnight and it expressed its displeasure by flopping over limply in protest until I put it back on the sill.  I still am not quite sure if I have enough sunlight for the tomato plants to thrive, but I’m hoping that as the sun climbs higher in the sky, I will have less shadows and more direct sun on the balcony.  I also have a barrel of compost for my kitchen scraps and coffee grinds started, and that should get going nicely once it warms up more. 

I am staggering everything on a week to week basis, ensuring that things will stay in control and I won't have a million pounds of eggplant to deal with all at once.  



More than anything, I really love the tactile experience.  Getting my hands dirty, poking seeds into the dank earth, watching obsessively the growth and water intake.  I've been scavenging for planters and pots on the cheap or free, so I'll have plenty to do once it's time to transplant them.  Most of the things recommend starting things outside in April, and although we haven't had a frost in weeks, I want to make sure I don't fail at patio gardening.

I have my booze at the ready and the cocktail shaker will get here eventually.  I’m just waiting for the sun to shine.

Heritage Days

For one weekend a year in September, you can see all sorts of things in Paris that you normally couldn't. It's the Journées du Patrimoine, the Heritage Days, when some notable closed-to-the-public spaces become public.

We headed over to the Palais du Luxembourg to see the Sénat. A pleasant surprise on the way there was that the Garden's Greenhouses were open as well.

So many honeybees!

I always feel like the bees know the days for collecting are numbered this time of year.

They do keep hives on the other side of the Garden. I'm sure that's why they have the most spectacular blooms.

The Sénat was a long wait to get in and packed with people.

The palais du Luxembourg was built for Catherine de Medici and it was appropriately fit for a queen before being repurposed into the Senate.

Monet's Garden

At the famed writer's roundtable at the Algonquin hotel (which is now run by Marriott, boo) they used to play a word game in which a word was shouted and you had to give a witty definition on the spot. Someone gave Dorothy Parker the word "Horticulture", in which she quipped, "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think".

Which made me giggle when I was 14 and it makes me giggle today still, especially when I find myself wandering around a beautiful oasis such as the garden in back of Monet's house.

I know that impressionist painting is kind of a gateway drug into fine art, and people love love love the impressionist wings at any museum. I grow a little tired of it- I feel it got really over exposed and commercialized with all this waterlilies this and waterlilies that printed on every imaginably surface. It's not my favorite style, but I realize that it was am important step in the abstract direction.

I'm not going to pass up a chance to check out a beautiful garden though.

I've been wanting to make the trip up for a while, but I really didn't want to deal with a rainy day. I'm glad I waited. This wouldn't have been a fun day otherwise.

It's an easy trip- a 45 minute train ride from St Lazare to Vernon station, and then either a quiet country walk for a couple miles, or a shuttle bus will bring you to the village of Giverny.

If you want to skip the line to get in, which is breathtakingly long, you can buy your tickets online in advance, or take a stroll over to the Impressionist Museum down the street and buy a combined ticket, and then you can smugly cut in front of everyone.

The gardens were lovely. The layers and layers of colors was just incredible. I don't think I've ever been to in such a highly concentrated pollenated area.

I was in awe of the work that went into this place.

SO MANY FLOWERS!

Everyone flocks to the part of the garden which because synonymous with Monet- the Waterlilies.

What begins as a quiet forest stream turns into the pond where his most famous works were painted. In French, these works are known as Les Nymphéas.

Inspired by prints from Japan, Monet had built himself a Japanese style water garden on a stream by the Seine.

It really does look like a Monet painting!

You couldn't help but feeling inspired by it.

I mean, I hate to gush and all, but it's a really lovely place.

July just happens to be when Les Nymphéas are in bloom. I'm sure it's lovely at any time of the year, but it was a real treat to see the blooms on the water.

We did make it a point to go very early in the morning, but it got crowded really quickly. We had a few quiet moments where the world was just sunny and peaceful and happy.

There were bees everywhere!

I'm actually surprised they aren't selling special Monet Honey in the giftshop.

You couldn't take pictures inside the house, but it had a lot of the Japanese art on the walls, a recreation of his studio, bedrooms with a garden view, and a really nice big kitchen.

I could have stayed there all day, watching the light change and watching the bees fill up their bee-pants with pollen.

The people watching wasn't all the bad either.

If you are in Paris and want to take a countryside daytrip, I would highly recommend it. Go early or on the weekdays to avoid the crowds, and they close from November-April.