I’m trying something new. It's called having a life.
Maybe you are, too? I've heard it's become increasingly popular, these past pandemic years.
To be honest, it’s a deeply uncomfortable experience.
There was a moment, last Saturday morning, when I found myself doing it, and a wave of nauseous panic hit me. Wasn't there something else I was meant to be doing at that moment?
Taking a child to sport?
Working on a looming writing deadline?
Cleaning my kitchen?
Replying to all the languishing Whatsapp chats?
Exercising?
Checking my emails?
Supervising homework?
Folding f**king washing?
Making content?
And, breathe. The main tenant of having a life, I reminded myself, is being comfortable with this: For these few minutes, you're just doing this thing that you like doing. And it's allowed.
What was I doing?
Well, I was up to my wrists in dirt. Fiddling about in the two little veggie beds my mum and I built in the front garden over Summer.
Watch: The easiest way to expand your kids’ eating habits. Post continues after video.
Checking on the progress of the eggplants, the green capsicums, the falling-over tomatoes and the tiny little sprigs of something-something that are poking through over near the basil that I talk to every time I walk past. What do I say to the basil?
I say, "You would cost me $20 at the supermarket."
Yes. I am becoming – despite all indicators to the contrary – a garden person.
It's middle age, of course, although we don't call it that anymore. It's midlife, thank you very much, and yes, I am aware that there are few stronger indicators of having arrived there than gardening. But we're talking about this one. Because I like this one the most.
One of the best messages I got when I first posted on Instagram about my veggies (see, the urge to make content to prove an activity has value is hard to resist for us addicts) was from a woman who said:
Welcome to middle-age, a time when gardening suddenly looks fun. The next level up is bird-watching.
We'll excuse her linguistic slip, friends. Everyone's learning.
For me, having a life means giving time to something that a) I don't have to and b) Has no real, direct purpose.
A hobby, you might say.
Until right now, if you’d asked me what my hobby was, I would have laughed. I would say, 'Who’s got time for that?' And then I’d tell you that I worked all the time and that my only hobbies were eating food with friends and reading books.
That would have been true. And also, for the past decade my kids’ hobbies were my hobbies, so… there was standing around in parks, pushing swings. There was rushing between after-school activities like a woman possessed. There was making meals that no one ate and shouting about screens for more hours than there are in the day.
I still engage in some of those hobbies, of course, but I've really slipped a few levels down the rankings. By choice.
See, what happened to me were two things that happen to the best of us, at various times in our lives: Change was forced upon me. And then, I read a book.
The change came when my family 'pulled a geographic' – which borrowed recovery speak for 'hoping that a physical move would result in a permanent lifestyle change'.
We had plotted the move for a long time, knowing that our family life, for us, had become unsustainable. But a part of me definitely believed that I could move out of the big, beautiful city where I'd spent the majority of my life, and nothing really would change. I won't bore you with tree-change nonsense (you can read about it here if you object to that), but spoiler alert: Moving away from everyone and everything you know will change things. Quite a lot.
I was struggling with it. I still do, some days. As the cliche goes, wherever you go, there you are – with your manic mind and your tendency to panic and your insecurity and your financial worries and your family dramas. They're all still there, but without the familiar crutches and supports. And at first, with the world closed down, it was isolating for all of us, and my catastrophising side was having a lot of free rein in all that peace and quiet.
Then I read a book. Wintering by Katherine May. Actually, I listened to it.
I don't know about you, but when I'm stressed out, one of the first things to go is my ability to focus on reading. For a writer, that's unfortunate. But when my mind is racing around, plagued with all the things I'm not doing right, the words just won't... stick. It's always a tell for me that things are a bit out of control. Listening works in a way that reading doesn't, in those moments.
Anyway. May's book became a bit of a big deal because entirely co-incidentally, she published it at exactly the time much of the world was being forced into "Winter" – AKA pandemic lockdowns. And that's what it's about. She writes that any life will have periods of Wintering – retreating, battening down the hatches, making things small and quiet – and sometimes that will be forced upon us and sometimes it will be by choice and that actually, periods of quiet are good for us all.
It's a beautiful book, and having it in my ears as I walked our dog around the empty (and then, literally wintry) streets of my new home, shifted something in me.
That particular winter passed, at least for most of us, and life has sprung back to busy. In the past six months, I have been on many planes, slept in many budget hotel rooms, crammed too many things into my diary, and made too many unrealistic commitments, just like I did before.
But now, when I'm stressing about life's complications, I'm also looking forward to my retreat, and asking myself, what did we move for? What did we want our life to look like? It's all around me. In my son's more relaxed shoulders, in my daughter's salty surf-suit. And in me. One of the things I wanted was to do things I'd never done before. Little things like... grow vegetables.
Of course, I still work hard – I do love working – and the kids' lives are still busy and I'm still pursued by parent guilt and partner guilt and daughter guilt and employee guilt, and all the attending little monsters, but what I've learned is what restores me. And I know now that's connecting with something tangible. Something real. Something very removed from the frenetic chatter of my brain and my professional life.
For me that's nature – I know it certainly isn't for everyone – and a very simple expression of that is the joy I've found in this silly little veggie garden.
So, if you care, and if you have even a little patch of space. Here's how I did it.
NB: I am not an expert, so please don't get mad if I've done things wrong. And I am a beginner, so excuse the inevitable naivete. But here goes.
1. I made it a joint project.
No one else who lives in my house cares about the veggie patch. But my mum was visiting from England over Summer, and she's become a bit of a gardener herself, in her post-work era. So we made it a joint project.
And now, Mum's back on the other side of the world, but I can send her pictures of the veggie-patch progress and it connects us, instantly. And also, now, it's just mine, which is a lovely kind of escape.
2. We picked a sunny spot that made sense.
I was originally imagining a veggie bed in our back garden, but then I remembered we have a puppy who runs free out there. And also, there was this weird little sunken, paved space out the front of our new house that we didn't have a use for, so I picked that. It has the added bonus of being street-facing, so you get to talk to the neighbours if they're passing. And they will always, always tell you to stake your tomatoes.
3. We bought two metal veggie beds from Bunnings and built them ourselves.
It was easy, the kids sort of helped, and it took no time at all. Then we moved them into place and lined them with two layers of mesh that would allow water to drain out but stop soil from running everywhere out the bottom.
4. We made a witches' brew.
I have a couple of friends and friends-of-friends here who do know a lot about gardening. One of them is a compost-aholic. I didn't have any compost ready to go, but I got a bit of advice, and basically we made a rich soil with a mixture of: Big bags of potting mix you buy at Bunnings; some pony poo we buy by the bag from the roadside; some compost bought at the markets; some cow poo; some more Bunning soil mix. And we filled up the veggie beds and mixed it and mixed it and watered them a lot.
5. We looked at what was in season and what would be easy to grow.
Lettuces. Cherry tomatoes. Herbs. Zucchini. They were our first.
And I bought a mixture of seedlings and actual seeds. The actual seeds we planted in little seedling pots to get to a fighting size before we whacked them in the beds.
6. We waited.
And watered. It's been a wet and hot summer down here on the south coast this year, so the odds have been in our favour.
7. We ate.
From my Smug Veggie Garden™️, we get herbs almost every day.
This morning I put lettuce from the garden on my daughter's chicken salad roll for school (my son would rather eat worms, so let's not pretend he's partaking). I've made a ratatouille from the eggplants and capsicums. The tomatoes are being eaten every damn day as they just keep coming. The rosemary went on a roast on the weekend.
We're a very (very) long way from being self-sufficient, but being able to go 'out the front' and grab a handful of actual food is... satisfying.
So. This little pocket of Having A Life is working for me.
The dollops of time I am allowed to go out there and fiddle about – clearing dead leaves, watering, fertilising, staking and digging are calming and precious. There's something deeply pleasing about watching nothing turn into something, just with time and light and water. Whenever you catch me making content from it (like, um, now), you'll know I'm struggling with the Just Being of it all. But I'm getting better.
And now we are about to head into Winter. And I have a lot to learn, so please feel free to jump into my DMs with advice for what's next. I need to learn about compost. And worms, apparently. And how to keep the nausea at bay when I'm panicked by the quiet joy of my first-ever hobby.
Feature Image: Supplied.
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