An
old Chinese saying goes like this. If you want to be happy for an
evening, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a week, go
travelling; if you want to be happy for a year, get married; if you
want to be happy for the rest of your life, grow a garden. I had this
in mind when in January I finally set foot on my first roof terrace.
I'd had balconies before and a real garden once, but the latter
didn't serve for much in the shade of surrounding buildings. This
time I got what I'd been looking for. I wanted to balance my sorry
life as a western consumer with shooting some green into the world. I
was close a long, long time ago, but I hadn't developed any garden
feelings yet at that age. The hours spent in my mother's garden still
lingered fresh in my memory. I set out with a two shelf terrace, with
herbs and paprika on top and carrots with zucchini and albergina
below in a wooden ditch. Some more albergina and zucchini in separate
boxes, all fixed from leftover wood and filled with large amounts of
dirt, the cheapest stuff available at the garden super. It all had to
be carried two floors up. Not bad.
Early
days were good. Everything sprang from seeds and most did well. The
daily chemtrailing assault by then was running its first quarter and
the sky had not yet been saturated as it is today. (Every week is
worse than the last, whatever the days look like. And the same goes
for months and for years. It's just a descent into hell.)
Anyway,
we weren't so depressed at the start. Just bewildered and angry,
scared if you will. I tried to forget about the madness by
concentrating on my gardener's plight. To protect the plants from the
rain which had started falling and which was of course horribly
filthy from whatever it was they were spraying, I had built a plexi
glass roof over my little vertical garden, like a cabinet to the sun.
Later I extended the roof when indeed albergina was seriously hurt by
some showers, burning holes in her beautiful, thick leaves. She
managed to recuperate quickly once safe, with zucchini's negro
belleza not quite that lucky. May was pure horror with nonstop rain
and wind, me having a hard time protecting my herd from horizontal
shower attacks. June started the road downwards, away from the dying
sun, dry and dirty and not even warm, let alone hot, from all the
filth in the air. The layer woven on some days captured our own
produce for added pleasure. Only the winds of July kept the skies
clean for some weeks, the lower parts that is, where we breathe and
live. Higher up you were starting to see a deep platinum veil at
perhaps 6 kilometres, it's hard to say how high. In August the
deepness was covered with a milky veil which kept most of the sun at
bay, and in September, a month with a touch of July in it, the
overall background colour had turned a plastic grey and our creator
in the sky now was barely able to send us their hope and support,
remedies that on the Mediterranean coast have always been abundantly
available.
Over
the summer, the plants suffered tremendously. Zucchini didn't make
it, though she did give me some flowers for dinner. Albergina fared
much better. She resisted the intermittent attacks of summer,
especially the scorching levels of UV raining down when the sun stood
high. That's all gone now. September has been easy and rich with
produce, not bad for a first year intent considering the hardships
getting them through summer. I will need more than a greenhouse for
protection next year, I'll need shade. If there is going to be a next
year, that is, because at the rate we are going it's starting to look
like a pretty filthy winter. And how are we going to escape from that
one come next spring? Will mother nature have any strength left?
I've
eaten twenty tiny hot paprikas which turned sweet if you let them go
red. I've had an equal number of small but wonderfully fresh tasting
albergines, I had two growths of rúcula, one before it all went bad
and the other in the aftermath when at least the persistent good
temperatures and the much weaker sun created something of a green
power ambiance which most of the plants seemed to have picked up and
joined in with. One of the marías died while being away for a few
days. A sudden July flash flood had seriously damaged her roots. It
was all too wet and the leaves were burning. All three marías
suffered heavy leave loss at some moment during summer and they sort
of scraped through, but for this drowned goddess it wasn't going to
be. The other two are fighting to produce enough honey before the
lights go out on the season, probably come early this year.
My
roof garden will celebrate its first year of the new era shortly
after winter. Be it still a while away, already the contract between
plant life and caretaker is feeling much like a marriage. I hadn't
thought it would be quite as difficult as it turned out to be under
the unforeseen circumstances. I had done smaller projects before, to
the availability of space and sunshine, and they had mostly worked
out to the satisfaction of both plant and man, under the sorry
circumstances.
I
shouldn't be whining and complaining so much, I know. When I started
out, the spraying had already begun so inside I knew it was going to
be a very difficult year. I understood anything I managed to get out
of my garden would be seriously contaminated. I sensed I was tending
a garden not so much as to help reduce the footprint as well as out
of despair. Nothing in this world can balance the amounts of poison
thrown out over our heads around the world. So what I have been doing
up here was never more than a protest, than a cry of anger, than
silent, stubborn resistance. Yet I feel betrayed. Whoever are behind
the spraying programme, they could have given us a few more years. If
they so desperately need to get rid of us, they might as well let us
wither away, see what comes.
Unfortunately
these days, America seems to be on a death trip and the whole world
will go down with her if nobody steps in. There are candidates, I
hear, but not all can find everybody's approval. So we'll see how
long we last. Meanwhile I continue tilling the soil, squeeze out the
last juices and prepare for a winter setup with onions and potatoes
and some cabbage, I guess.
I
hope it will last.
