Progress Report: Vegetable Garden.

The feature painting is by Guiseppe Arcimboldo: it’s called L’ete, and painted in 1573. We can take it as read Guiseppe was a vegetable man.

Updating my Gardening Art post, we (three helpers and yours truly) have filled my vegetable frames – well, I didn’t build them, one of the helpers with more clues than I did – with a purchased mixture of dirt and compost. Fair to say it was labourous, taking us an entire day because, unfortunately, I bought sticky dirt that had to be helped down the chute: every single damned sod.

Remaining to do is to build (well, it’s contracted, also) the glasshouse on top of the far, U-shaped frame, then plumb in a new outside tap pumped from our two 9,000 litre rain water tanks for an automatic watering system.

There’s only one glitch with this veritable Garden of Eden: it’s struck me, too late, that my dastardly good plan of waist high vegetable gardening has a flaw: I’m going to need a ladder to pick vertical vegetables such as tomatoes, broad beans and corn, and I don’t have a head for heights. Proving no matter what you do, there’s always a snake in any garden laughing at you: let’s call it swedenfreude.

And with that dreadful vegetable neologism I’ll wander off with my blisters into wine night Friday, leaving you with Guiseppe’s 1573 painting – a good year for vegetables, obviously – L’automn, which I’d hazard a guess means autumn (interpreted via vegetables), but I prefer to call it Old Potato Head:

Sorry, will have to leave Winstanley of Jeymar for my next post …