Every kinder and daycare day I take the boys in on the bike, with them in a trailer. I love it, they love it. It takes about 11 minutes each way. Today, the first day of proper nasty weather of the new season, so great was the headwind it took 23 minutes. Most of the unripe tomatoes spent the night getting jostled about to the point where they've fallen off the now horizontal plants. The zucchinis that are on their last legs are now looking like they're really done. The pumpkins and chickens are utterly unfazed.
I'm not very good at succession planning, and so the garden always has a sad transition where productivity drops to nothing while I decide what to plant. I should have decided earlier, it's not like autumn comes as a surprise. But, alas, I never do.
Do I go with something that's expensive to buy and hard to find? Usually these are hard to grow. Do I go with something easy to grow, then? Well usually these are easy to find and cheap to buy: refer to the 300kg of zucchini I've eaten over the summer.
Where hard to find and easy to grow overlap is my personal, unimaginative and lazy sweet spot. At this time of year that means beetroot that isn't purple, cabbage that's actually sweet and broccoli that tastes heaven sent. Chioggia beet that looks like a stripy candy cane. Golden beets like a winter sun. White beetroot like... a white beetroot. Golden acre cabbage, purple broccoli. All immensely tasty, moronically easy to grow and literally never ever in Woolworths. And garlic that actually tastes of garlic, isn't sprayed with bromide, and doesn't cost $200 a kilo. You'll find a bulb in every nook and cranny where one will fit. Cabbage moth hate it too, so it's a good pal for the brassicas.
That sounds like a decision made, doesn't it. Time to get my fingernails dirty.
The desk is coming along nicely. The legs are shaped and waiting for stretchers. This is where decisions made in the past are either lauded or maligned: the stretchers will be like wooden i-beams, intended to give rigidity to the wide unsupported expanse at the front. It will look light and elegant, but still needs to be rigid enough that it doesn't feel like typing on a trampoline.
But that will have to wait till Monday, because now the wind has forced my hand and I have to go and turn all those green tomatoes into chutney. At least picking them up will be good active recovery from the bike ride.