The first of the gardens was the patio garden. Or, rather, the huge planter that divides my patio from the unit (still unoccupied) to the west. It's right outside my office window, and the landscapers left a huge chunk of it unplanted. There was nothing growing there and a great big blank space right outside the window that I looked at most of the time. So, I started planting stuff there. (As I tell my neighbours, forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission, and, besides, one of the landscapers told me that there were no plans to plant anything, and gave me permission [which was probably not hers to give] to plant there.)
It's terrible soil. You can tell that most of the stuff here was done on the cheap, and the soil fill was obviously obtained from the cheapest source, is barely composted, and is full of plastic. The carrots absolutely refused to even sprout, and everything else has had trouble, although the snow peas did give me a bit of a crop. But I did manage to get some greenery going in there. One of my neighbours referred to my "forest" a couple of days ago.
(Most of which I don't see anymore. Now that it is getting hotter, the folly of getting an apartment on the sunny side of the building is coming home to roost. Despite the fact that heat and hot water is provided by a heat pump, and all the units have vents that are supposed to be for fixed air conditioning, no air conditioning was ever put in, the vents are useless, and I have to keep all the blinds closed against the sun and heat.)
So, yesterday afternoon, someone pushed a letter under my door. The Powers-That-Be don't won't me to garden in the planters. They've had six months to get used to the idea, and the office looks out onto my patio, so it's not as if this must be any surprise to them.
I suppose I should be mildly offended. And, I suppose it would be provocative if I were to reply and say that I have no intention of struggling to plant anything more in the wretched soil of the planters, after all the trouble it has been to get *anything* to grow in them so far. (Actually, since I've put some broad beans into that area, I've improved the soil in that planter, probably by a considerable amount.)
But, instead I am giggling about the letter. Because they have asked me to "Please reframe" from planting in the landscape areas. Gloria would have had a hoot over such a letter.
Would it be churlish of me to inform them that I have already "reframed" the patio by providing some greenery?
I hope they don't come and pull it all out. The sunflowers, which were attacked in so many ways so many times, have finally grown five stalks in the patio garden, and are just about ready to flower. (It may be the sunflowers that have prompted the complaint, since one of them, aided by the fact that the planter is about a foot and a half high, is now about eight feet tall. This is probably the origin of the "forest" comment.) I also hope that they don't pull out the corm under the sunflowers. I've got six stocks that have survived, and a number of them are to the point of producing the tassels on top, so I have high hope that they might even produce some ears of corn!
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