A garden diary 🍃
Our little oasis between the jungle and the sea.
I wrote something in Notion every day for a year when we first arrived in Mo’orea. Here’s something I wrote back in October of 2022.
Martin spends most days either in the garden or thinking about the garden.
He works, sure. But you can tell while he’s typing away he’s thinking about planting things.
It’s pretty stark, the transformation since we arrived back. Melbourne and city living is not for this boy. He needs trees. Plants. Greenery. Dirt under his fingernails and between his toes. Rain in his hair.
In the cold concrete environment of Melbourne or Sydney he wilts; a tropical plant in a tiny pot, unable to spread roots. Here, he flourishes, spreads, grows upwards.
Some days, he’s taking sprouts from the banana trees to replant in holes up in the jungle. Other days he’s teetering high on spindly branches, making marcots of the fruit trees. This involves wrapping dirt around a branch and encouraging the branch to sprout roots. It makes a genetic twin of the tree, so you can recreate the delicious pamplemousse tree, the rambutan, the tiny sweet lemons.
He makes compost tea, waters things, moves plants around. Plants seeds, pots and repots seedlings.
I helped to plant a bunch of eggplant seeds. There were also some older ones which I’ve put in the soil but might not come up. Two zucchini and a bunch of cucumbers.
The eggplants have poked their tiny, two-leaved sprouts above the rich brown dirt. I feel very invested in them, like they’re my babies.
It looked like one of the zucchinis sprouted. Martin crushed my hopes when he pointed out it was one of the little weeds that spring up in the other pots; some type of oxalis, wide and heart-shaped.
It’s all a grand experiment. I want to do more!
Note from today, 14/8/24
Since then, we managed to eat a few beautiful little eggplants, a whole bunch of okra, but sadly no zucchinis!
There are a couple of little cucumbers on a vine (fingers and toes crossed we get to harvest something before it gets eaten by a chicken), we put some green beans and spinach in the baby’s soup today, and pulled a delicious manioc out of the ground.
We got 4 breadfruit off the tree the other day which we cooked on the fire and ate with salted butter. Every second week or so, Martin will come down from the mountain with a huge bunch of bananas. There are papayas, grapefruit, guava. I’m excited for avocado season!
And, best of all… we have laying hens again. We’re getting 5-7 eggs a day. Breakfast sorted!
If you liked this diary post, I previously wrote about tourists on cruise ships or go right back to the beginning where I wrote about first year culture shocks.