Spring is here, even if the calendar insists it is not. Most of the trees are budding, the peonies are sending deep red phallic spears into the air, the bulbs are up, if not yet all out (although the hyacinth have been blooming for weeks now). The peach trees have been sprayed against leaf curl and are about a week out from flowering.

Most of the garden is set. It has been weeded, composted, and mulched heavily with pea straw - which the Indian Doves love. I have a pair that nest near here and every year they await with anticipation my pea straw mulch so they can dive in under the straw after the loose peas.

On the minus side a family of rats made themselves a cost home under the mulch, too, until I noticed one of them as they left for a day’s work in the garden.

I have decided to grow more flowers this year and have set seed for double phlox, hollyhocks, cosmos, poppies, stock, a half dozen others. One of my major vegetable beds was last year, during my period of incapacity, taken over by the children of a single but very fertile foxglove and so I have succumbed and allowed the bed to revert to flowers.

But I will have a few vegetables. Not a vast many, but a few. Just my favourites. I have cleaned out the hothouse and set seed for leeks, button squash, zucchini, pumpkin, cucumbers (every year I seem to have a disaster with them so this year am hoping to get at least one!), beetroot, silverbeet (chard). I will also put in salad leafy things once I uncover the veggie beds from their layer of mulch and it warms up a bit.

I will also grow tomatoes and capsicums but will cheat and buy ready growing plants from my local nursery (they sell the old heirloom varieties which I like) this year rather than raise from seed. I’ll give it another 3-4 weeks before I get them.

I also have seed for … walking stick cabbage which peculiar plant originates from the island of Jersey. I had no idea about this until recently when someone mentioned it to me. And then, a couple of weeks ago, I was in a hardware store when I walked past their seed counter and lo! They were selling seed for walking stick cabbage! I will have to try a few of them. This page shows the finished product.

So - I have a garden of mulched beds and lots of little pots waiting for seed to sprout!

Which means, I have some time for the blog, sadly neglected. It has been a busy few months as I have had to finish a book, as well spend what time I can in the garden.

I am mostly fairly well right now, with the occasional bad patch, which are bearable enough.

But to business, the garden. I have tried to spend a few days a week in the garden, even if it is just 15 minutes a day. Some days have been good and I’ve been out most of the day, others it is just the 15 minutes, but … gradually the garden is being cajoled back into shape. At the moment the garden is (mostly) a mass of weeded and mulched garden beds and looks fairly boring. I have been fairly severe with it, taking out things that haven’t been doing well. About 75% of the veggie beds are now manured and composted and heavily mulched for the spring/summer season.

This year I am going to plant more flowers. Not so many vegetables. Just the things I really like. A flower garden can mostly take care of itself once it has been planted out, but a veggie garden needs constant work. So I am hoping to stay well enough long enough to get a nice flower garden in.

If not, well, a bare but mulched garden bed is not the worst thing that can happen to a garden!

I have got lots of seeds to start out soon, and yesterday I planted three more peonies (I have lost some over the past 2 years): Felix Crousse - hopefully they will flower this year, although peonies generally hate being transplanted.

As I have been clearing I have been finding lots and lots of old clay pots. These I will be doing something very special with once a bright day and a pile of energy comes along!

But, mean time, there are more beds that need weeding. *sigh*

As for the Self-Sufficiency experiments. Well, that ended half good half bad. The summer was excellent, as I’d been good through spring of last year and had planted lots of stuff from which I ate well. But then from early summer I became progressively sicker, and I did not plant anything for winter, although I did have a bed of leeks, some brussel sprouts, and a bed of winter beets to eat from.

Oh, the rain, I love it!

(It has taken me about 3 hours to write this damned post because a few weeks ago I also got a new computer replete with new software, and trying to get one of the bits of software to do what it was supposed to … grrrrr!)

I have been here - I have just been working. Last week I emailed off my latest book to my editor at HarperCollins, Steph Smith, and now I can get back to the garden.

The book, The Devil’s Diadem, has been a life saver. It has given me something to do each day, something to look forward to, and I have loved every moment of writing it. I hated finishing it - so much so that I am now deep in planning for my next venture. It is almost as if the book has been a charmed talisman. Most of it I wrote while undergoing chemo - one week sick as a dog in bed, one week not so sick and sitting in front of the computer typing away as if my life depended on it, and trying to fit in all my medical appointments as well. As far as chemo goes, I am having a break for it for a while until the cancer springs back - no one knows how long that will be … but not long, unfortunately.

But, in the meantime, there is the garden. First a huge thank you to Paula Moss who arrived one day with cup cakes and a willing pair of hands and who toiled away in the woodland pruning and weeding for me. That was so wonderful - thanks again Paula. Every time I go down to the woodland now I am amazed by how much Paula managed to get through.

I am slowly getting back into the garden myself. Doing a bit of weeding, a bit of clearing, a bit of digging (not much as I still find this very hard). Just little bits, here and there. But the little bits mount up. Yesterday I amazed myself by digging up six shrubs that had completely overgrown a brick path. The shrubs are still there, lying on the path - so today’s exercise will be to shift them to some infill and reclaim the path. Pruning and more pruning. Why did I plant so many robinias??

The vegie garden is still there although needs much work. I have leeks and beets, carrots and still some capsicum coming through (although the capsicums are soon for the next world). I also have some old-ish potatoes sitting under the car port . Every night the industrious rats come along and steal some potatoes and roll them about 5 metres to the rat hole to under the house. There the potatoes stay as the rats can’t get them through the hole. It is good of the rats to point out to me so conveniently where their rat hole is so I can contemplate some rat extermination. Every morning, without fail, three potatoes exactly sitting about this hole where the rats have tried furiously to get them down. I have to admire their industry.

We have had virtually no rain at all this year. The garden is incredibly dry - last year was fantastic for rain. This year, ghastly.

Thank you again to everyone who replied to the Silence of the Dying post. The response has been amazing.

I apologise for not updating the blog more often. Sometimes everything gets too much and I just can’t cope with things - then I tend to go into hibernation.

Today I did something tremendously unusual. I went to visit a professional who attended to my bodily needs - and this visit did not involve any pain, it did not involve any needles, it did not involve anyone saying, “Just a little prick!” and then hurting me horribly, it did not involve any IVs or drugs or radiography (and even larger needles … “Sorry! Just had to push through your abdominal wall … can’t get any local that deep!”), or having my vital obs taken, or tablets or alcohol smell or anything.

I went to the hairdresser. It was so mundanely normal I am tearing up even as I type about it. I’ve been growing my hair back for a year now (the last lot of chemo thinned my hair but it didn’t leave me bald, thank God) and it has grown back a disastrous mouse colour and in a tight patch of unruly evil curls. I am going to kill the next person who rattles on about how lovely curls are. I don’t give a damn. They are cancer curls and they are vile. Anyone who has cancer and who has been ravaged by treatment can’t wait until they start to get ‘normal’ back - and thus my hair. Over the past 6 months I’ve been too ill to make it the 3 blocks to the hairdresser (and that’s too short for a taxi to want to take me) but today Chemo Bitch* managed to get down there … and the normal me came home.

Gone are the evil curls. Gone is the horrid greying mousy thatch. Back is the wavy-haired soft blonde me. I keep going to the mirror and looking. I can’t believe it. That’s me. Looking normal.

I was so amazed, and so normalized, that I immediately went out and weeded half the bog garden’s path. (Which is more gardening than I have managed in about 8 months.)

The poor garden. It has suffered but not too horribly. It needs a good weed. It needs attention. It will get it, I hope, in little bits over the winter. While I am, hopefully, going through a ‘normal’ stage.

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*Chemo Bitch is a superhero. Spangly tights and all. I save the world from evil medics who can’t get an IV in the first attempt. I can take out consultants with a single snarl.