Gardening, like Architecture is about the small details. All the small things add up to create the bigger picture. Being a bit of a Greenie I find it hard to throw anything away that still may have some use. After 25 years of use my old Barbie finally wasn't up to the task any more. I had finally upgraded to one of those stainless steel hooded barbies and when I was dismantling the old burners from the frame I realised that 25 years of sausage fat splatter had protected the hardwood beautifully. The metal burners, manifolds and valves had corroded beyond salvage but the timber frame was too good to dispose of. I had an old laundry tub I had kept from when I re-modeled the laundry & with a bit of rough carpentry I managed to fix it into the frame & had a lovely mobile potting bench.
From Potting bench to upmarket Drinks trolley
An upcoming birthday bash with a hundred people coming over persuaded me to change my potting bench into a drinks trolley. A few more hardwood slats over the handles, a coat of paint and it was looking the part. An old nylon door-stop screwed into the base just below the bypass overflow hole of the tub created a perfect place to put a vintage umbrella.... From rubbish to garden feature....its all about creativity & the fine detail.
I have grown plants from seed my whole life. I first discovered the joy of raising my own plants from seed as a young child, when I collected and saved pumpkin seeds while watching my mother prepare the evening meal. I would wash them and dry them on a piece of paper towel and then seal them in an envelope with a label on them describing the contents. I would pester mum to buy a different type of pumpkin every time we went to the greengrocer and spent hours just looking at the magnificent specimens the green-grocer would place in the window as displays. Pumpkin, squash, trombone, marrow... it didn't matter to me, as they were just the most amazing looking vegetables I had ever seen.
How to raise Pumpkins
In Spring I planted these saved seeds out into small pots and waited for the show. Within a week the seeds emerge from the soil, each pushed out on the apex of 2 emergent seedling leaves. As the leaves expand the empty seed husk falls away. After about 2 weeks a central mature leaf emerges centrally to the first two leaves. This will eventually become the leading stem of the vine, with leaves forming alternately down its length. If the central bud from this is removed when the vine is about 2 meters long it will encourage lateral stems to grow from the main leader. Pumpkins have both male and female flowers. Laterals not only provide more foliage but also have more female flowers. My morning task would be to pick a male flower, pare back the leaves to expose the bright yellow dusty center and dab the pollen onto the female flowers. Each day the baby pumpkin fruit will grow visibly bigger until it achieves full size. Although the fruit doesn't get any larger after around 3 weeks, the fruit is still ripening and the seeds will not be ready for another month or so.
Store your Pumpkins
If you want to store your pumpkins you need to leave them on the vine until the end of Autumn to ensure that the skin hardens. Pumpkin is about 50 cents a kilo in summer at harvest time, but by the end of winter is about $4 a kilo.... so it is worth the wait. Roasts are best in winter, so resist the temptation to eat your pumpkins immediately & just leave them in a dry, dark airy place and they will last many months. When you are preparing that special roast from your prize pumpkin, save a few seeds and continue the cycle through to the next season. By selecting the best fruit for seed collection you will ensure a better resultant crop the next year. It is a tricky job getting any vegetable from the garden to the table.... you will battle snails and millepedes, slater bugs, aphids and mildew, birds and rats and the kids next door. To maximise your chances of success always select seeds from the best parent plants, as the chances are that their seed will pass on these traits.
Pumpkin Seed and Architecture
My Adelaide Architectural practice has a lot to do with the processes I cultivated as a young child. My parents grew up in the Great depression when frugality was the norm. They taught me that if you could do something yourself you should and if you could reuse something you would. This mindset lead me to collect those first pumpkin seeds rather than throw them away.
The world has turned on its head in recent years. The advent of the GFC and global warming has made economic caution and recycling both practical and necessary. Suddenly my old fashioned attitudes and values are mainstream. Growing pumpkins as a child taught me patience. It taught me to recognise the beauty in even the simplest of things. It taught me to look for detail and it taught me problem solving and research skills. Learning about the ecology and the web of life in a classroom is not the same as experiencing it in the garden. I loved growing vegetables as a child and collecting pumpkin seed was my first step in a lifetime journey.
Fresh air, sunlight and exercise are a great start to the day. Gardening provides all of this and more. Gardening provides its practitioners with a tangible connection to the environment that is deeply satisfying. There is something primal and meditative in the gardening process. My morning ritual is to prepare a cup of coffee and walk around my garden, focusing attention on each plant. This is the meditative part of gardening. When I conduct my morning walk I am not concentrating on anything else but my plants. I mentally check each plant for health as I stroll past. Water stress, pests, new shoots, flower buds, too much or too little seasonal shade, competition with other plants....these are just a few of the things that any good gardener notices with a glance. This singularity of concentration is not something that I am even conscious of doing. It all occurs at some deeper level. Add in the Vitamin D therapy I get from my early morning dose of sunlight and my half an hour walk in the garden is a great way to both relieve stress & avoid depression.
Connecting To The Seasons and Architecture
My morning garden walks provide me with a connection to my immediate environment and the seasons that has helped me in my professional life as an Adelaide Architect. Understanding how the suns arc across the sky changes with the seasons is one of the core principals of energy efficient building. Understanding how topography and local geography combine to form micro-climates is a natural part of gardening. It is also a natural part of good Architecture. Placement of hard landscaping elements (such as buildings, garden walls and patios) in an appropriate relationship to the natural physical surroundings can favorably modify the local environment. Soft landscaping (plantings) and hard landscaping when combined together with thought and experience can enhance each other not only visually and physically but also effect the user experiencing that space on a deep emotional level.
One of the first lectures I attended as an Architecture student stressed how we should all spend 5 minutes every morning and evening studying the sky. We should do this for for a year, noting where the sun rose and set. Another lecturer told us to take notice of everything & take a notebook with us so we could capture those things that mattered. As students the enthusiasm wore off and I doubt that one of us did what was asked. Those lecturers gave us good advice.... Architecture is all about the detail and intimate knowledge of the seasons is a great help, ensuring a design not only looks good but functions in an environmentally responsive (and responsible) way. It took me years to finally really understand the seasons and be able to achieve that transcendental meditative state of really seeing when looking. For me it was my love of gardening that facilitated this transition. My advice to new students of Architecture is to take up a small plot of land and tend it.... your health, your architecture, the environment and your future clients will all benefit.
