SYDNEY—My daughter’s home in Sydney is a bungalow with a deck at the back, with a glass-topped table for six and comfortable patio chairs. It leads to a large yard that has a tall lemon tree bursting with fruit, a lush calamansi bush, and various other plants that have been there forever. On one side is the sampayan—a very efficient clothesline that spins with the wind, and a garden shed that houses an assortment of discarded furniture, electronics, other household stuff, and long unused gardening equipment.
The deck is my favorite spot—a perfect place to sit with a book, or a notebook, with music playing on Spotify. When I was in Sydney a year ago, this space had been claimed by ugly black and white magpies and large black crows that dropped their poop on every chair, rendering it unusable by humans. After I carried all the chairs to the yard and got rid of the bird poop with a brush, soap, and a strong water hose, I left them out in the bright Sydney sunshine to dry. But when I came back an hour later, the birds had reclaimed the chairs, with bird droppings galore!
This time around, though, the birds seem to have lost interest in the deck chairs. I have sat there in deep thought, wondering what to do about the weeds and grass that have overtaken the garden, and there has been no sign of an avian invasion.
I have never lived in a house that had a yard I could cultivate. Now that I‘m living in one, I am challenged to work the soil, and perhaps grow something—flowers, vegetables, whatever will respond to my aspiring gardener’s hands.
It started with the price of fresh ginger here in Sydney, which is prohibitive. Thus, here at home, we use minced or powdered bottled ginger, which, to a Filipino palate, just doesn’t cut it. And, since my granddaughter is allergic to garlic, the kitchen is a “no garlic” zone. So, I have become adept at cooking without the basic ingredients of Pinoy cuisine.
Back home in Quezon City, our cook, Eba, grows veggies and root crops in a small plot at the end of the compound where we live. She grows ginger by planting the spores—those little toe-like protrusions from which grow shoots that become new “hands”—and growing what has become a constant supply of fresh ginger. In Sydney, under Eba’s guidance via Messenger, I “invested” in a medium-sized cut of ginger that I bought at the store, divided it into pieces, and planted five of them in pots of soil I found abandoned on the deck. To be fair, my daughter warned that she couldn’t guarantee the quality of the soil in her long abandoned pots.
I watered and spoke to the ginger roots for several weeks, but they didn’t grow roots. But I saw a video on Spotify of ginger growing abundantly in water, so I pulled them out of the soil and put them in a dish of water. But they lay there, unproductive—catatonic, even. When the ginger did not grow roots nor shoots, I lost interest in the project. But recently, I found a bunch of very dry ginger in a plastic container that I bought on sale two months ago and stored in a dark pantry that I had forgotten about, and behold, they had grown shoots!
I put them in the soil, along with their unproductive relatives. Let’s see how it goes.
I have this sudden itch to improve the yard that has not been getting much attention, what with everyone here either in school or at work all week. I bought gardening gloves and lined up the gardening tools that have been lying idle on a shelf on the deck.
I started by snapping off dead branches, and pulling the grass and weeds that have practically strangled a large barrel of agapanthus. I tried to trim the wild vines growing wildly over the fence to make room for the fragrant pink jasmine that also grows wild and blooms profusely at certain times of the year.
My daughter’s collection of succulents, bless them, are surviving, but they need to be trimmed, replanted, and re-positioned on the deck. There is also a stand with a dozen small pots that I want to grow herbs in. I thought I could start with packets of seeds I found in a cabinet at the back, but they are all expired.
Can I keep this up? I don’t know. I’m starting to realize that owning gardening gloves does not a gardener make. In truth, especially these very hot summer days, I prefer doing the laundry and watch it drying in the sun, and being in the kitchen creating dishes using what’s available in the ref.
Can I keep this up? I don’t know. I’m starting to realize that owning gardening gloves does not a gardener make
In truth, I have never been a homemaker, not even a housewife. Although I cooked and baked occasionally, and even made a business selling my pies and cookies at Christmas time, I was always a full-time working stiff.
I worked from the get-go, first as a teacher in a barrio in Surigao, then as a journalist, which became my career with a few detours into government work as a human rights commissioner and later doing peace work in talks with the Communist Party of the Philippines. Upon retirement from journalism, I took on jobs as a freelance writer and editor of books. I’ve worked on dozens of projects, from light paperbacks to serious academic treatises, to full-color, heavily pictorial coffee table books.
During the pandemic, working purely online from our computers at our homes, my artist friend Mai Ylagan and I produced two coffee table books without meeting our clients face-to-face. This year, we completed the 50th anniversary book of the APO Hiking Society, Limang Dekada Na Po Kami, that was launched last July. It was a challenging but joyous undertaking.
I figured that the APO book would be my last, and I began thinking of what to do next as I approach the inevitable 8-0. I could learn to knit or crochet, but I’ve never finished a project, even in school. I have always envied my three sisters for their homemaking skills. They could knit, crochet, sew, embroider, cook, and made jams from fruits grown in their gardens. But I figured that while they excelled in using their hands to create and grow, I use mine differently—to write, create and grow ideas towards nurturing a just peace and a free community, country, and world.
But the garden beckons. When I dug my fingers into the soil to plant the ginger, it felt good, natural, and true. Now, if only it would grow! As my mother, who knew me well, having completed all of my home economics projects when I was in high school, would say, vamos a ver.
Meanwhile, there is always writing. Here in Sydney, I am grateful for the time and space to write. I’ve even turned out a couple of poems.
