There is a strange satisfaction about planting new and baby plants that you nurtured to life. It feels like magic, as if you are playing god, as if you are creating from nothing, creatio ex nihilo, creating something out of nothing. When you make a cutting, you are essentially taking a piece of another plant, and turning it into a new plant. Do this enough, and you can make thousands of plants.
My goal was to create as many indigenous spekboom or Portulacaria Afra baby plants as I could. I then had to fly and visit my girlfriend who lives in another province or very far from where I have my garden. I trusted my family with keeping my plants alive. And it worked! My father kept my spekboom plants alive. The photograph below is a testament to this:
The spekboom plant is a wonderful one, as you can eat the leaves and they capture a lot of carbon from the air. I have made a post about the spekboom plant many moons ago, in which I deep-dive into this plant. I have also written many recipes on here about this wonderful plant in my culinary journeys, from chutneys, to salads, to a tzatziki. I love cooking with this plant. It grows so easily, you can basically stick it in the ground and it will grow. At my father's beach house, we normally get a lot of broken branches because of heavy winds. We just stick them in the ground and they grow into new plants.
The way these plants reproduce is similar. With elephants usually eating them, the broken branches that fall to the ground will grow into new plants. It is that simple.
In any case, I digress.
My father did not use my compost, so most of the compost buckets basically turned into worm poop or worm compost. You can see from the fine texture in the photograph below:
There were so many worms in these buckets, it was something of a miracle.
I emptied these buckets where I wanted to plant the spekboom baby plants and I started to plant! There were about 15 or so plants that survived the time I was away.
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I get a child-like joy when I plant new plants. There is also the fear of the plants dying, but this will only be realised in the future and not in the immediate moment. The moment of planting is the next phase of creation, of making something new. The wonderful moment of creation is set in motion when the first signs of new leaf growth show. That moment when the first baby leaf shows sends so much happiness through my heart.
I also took the opportunity to plant some new seeds. I have stored many seeds over the years, and I do not think they are stored at optimal conditions. So, I might as well just plant as many seeds as I can, growing new plants, and harvesting new seeds. The first batch of seeds that I plants, shown above, were some garlic chives. I continually harvest these plants, but they always grow back, with more vigour and producing even more seeds. In the future, I will show you what I do with all of the flowers!
Below, I planted some African Daisy or Gazania seeds. They make the most beautiful flowers. Most of them did not survive the extreme December and January heat, so I want to see if I can grow some from seed. Sometimes they struggle to reproduce from seed. But I pray to the gardening-gods to help me regrow them as the flowers are spectacular.
And then there is the basil and amaranth situation... I say situation because, like always, these plants outgrow my capacity to eat them. A couple of weeks ago, in fact 40 days ago, I planted some basil and amaranth seeds. Today, these plants are flourishing, the amaranth growing leaves as big as my hands (photograph below the basil and amaranth photographs), the basil growing so much that I cannot make enough basil pesto!
I always hope for abundance, but when it arrives, I am not always sure what to make with it. Amaranth leaves are not always eaten by people in my neighbourhood, so it does not always help to give it away, and basil is such a fragile plant but also very strong. I might ask around and hear if people want some basil. The more you prune it, the better they grow. So, either I will give it to friends and family, or I will throw it in the compost, feeding my hungry system.
But please appreciate the size of these amaranth leaves in just 40 days!
In any case, I hope that your garden is giving you some nice produce. It always amazes me how much we can harvest from our gardens, taking only what we need, giving back to nature what she can take, and then regrowing everything every year as nature dictates.
Happy gardening for now, and keep well.
All of the writings and musings in this post are my own, inspired by the smell of basil on my fingers. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300.