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Gardening with my grandad was a lesson in patience. When I was a child my mother worked to put food on the table and shoes on our feet so I spent a lot of my time with my grandparents who lived across the road from us. Grandad had a milk round after retiring from the family bakery because the flour had 'got on his chest'.
Now he struggled on with gout, on his feet all day then soaking his poor swollen feet in basins of Epsom's salts each evening. Looking back I realise he was an absolute hero. I loved him at the time, but now I wish he was still here, mainly because I would like to tell him how great he was. Not only did he work very hard, but he also tolerated my presence around his domain, his huge and fantastic garden. It was all very organised and from the unpromising looking earth he drew pounds of produce which my Nana then used to make tasty dishes.
Any way I thought I would be helpful one day by picking all the heads of the roses to make perfume, and tidy the garden up a bit too. You know that man didn't even flinch; he just gently explained that apart from the ones he cut for the house he would rather the flowers stayed on the rosebushes; 'for everyone to enjoy, see?' Although he had shown no anger at all, realising I had made a big mistake I went off to make a den with Nana's 100% Merino-all -the-way-from-Australia traveling rugs. I chose as the site for this edifice one of three very large and bountiful bramley apple trees that had been planted by my great grandfather.
I don't know how or why I had a knife, I don't know why I decided that gouging away an area of bark about the size of a dinner plate from the tree was a good idea, or even an idea at all. When he found out what I had done Grandad didn't even ask me why I had done it he just said the tree would be 'poorly' if we didn't help it straight away.
He fetched some silver coloured paint from his shed then carefully and lovingly painted over the gaping wound my thoughtlessness had created. In a final flourish he painted a band all the way around the tree and said it was a lucky ring.
For years, every time I visited that garden I checked the progress of the scar. At first it just seemed to scab over, but gradually the edges of the wound drew closer together until unless you knew what had happened, you would have never known what had happened.
Twenty years later, on the day of Grandad's funeral I searched for that wounded place and finding it put my hand over it and remembered the patient and stoical work of someone who probably had better things to do that afternoon than repair my thoughtless handiwork and the way I would always remember him and his love because of it.
As a teacher, I try my best to put this example into my own work, staying as calm and helpful as Grandad Fred always did with me when I went wrong. Oh, the shame when I fail.
By ayesha christmas from Kranj
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We all know how important our Grandmas are and tell them all the time, but please don't forget to let the Grandpas know how much we need them too!
The first greenhouse I ever visited belonged to my Grandad Fred. He was a tiny, fiercely intelligent, one-eyed, milkroundsman who because of the early morning nature of his job had plenty of time to work on his huge garden and in his large greenhouse. During the summer the greenhouse was filled with the pungent aroma of ripe and ripening tomatoes, and the equally strong pong of a disinfectant Jeyes fluid (used liberally keep the potato blight away). Grandad Fred was a model for any gardener, no rushing at a job for him, years of experience had made him understand the basic truth of "slow and steady wins the race".
I am currently living in Slovenia, I grow my own vegetables now, my plot abutting one meticulously maintained by Tommy, a man very similar to Grandad Fred. Plenty of advice is on offer, unfortunately in a language I don't understand! He was very shocked on discovering that I had started my pole beans indoors then brought them out to plant after the danger of a late frost had passed. He told me (somehow) that my plan would end in disaster. He got me so worried that I made little individual covers from horticultural fleece for my baby bean plants and spent an hour tying them all on (he found this second idea even more amusing than the first).
My cosseted beans quickly outgrew their romper suits, scrambled up the poles so kindly lent to me by Tommy. They do that differently in Slovenia too, planting 5 plants around the base of each pole (they are as thick as a small tree!) rather than the strong but thin bamboo poles we tend to use in the UK which will only support 1 plant each. Tommy had stood over me after he had marched across to my plot with a big stack of the slovene poles, when I just put 1 plant in for the first one it seemed to set him off again.
It's amazing how much ridicule can be conveyed through someone's tone of voice. Sarcasm and scorn can hurdle any language barrier effortlessly, meaning that pretending not to understand the words that are being shouted at you just won't work. I planted 5 plants around the base of the poles. Tommy nodded approval in the way one might encourage a small child who has just eaten spinach for the first time and returned to his cucumbers.
I had the last laugh though because before you could say 'Jack and the Beanstalk scarlet or white flowers festooned my beans plants which by now had scrambled to the top of the poles. Even my own Grumpy Old Man was impressed (which is not a common occurrence) and suggested dryly that I might give Tommy the first picking of the beans as they were so clearly going to be so much earlier that the ones he had put in. Tommy's beans did look a bit quiet and were so far behind mine in terms of both height and flowers, it seemed this would be possible. But I was operating in a different horticultural universe now and decided it was not good politics to gloat. Plus if anyone was going to eat the first beans of those poles, it was going to me!
All I really wanted at this stage was Tommy to come over and admire/praise/say anything remotely positive about my beans. To perhaps admit that he had bean wrong and I had bean right. Each day if we were on our plots at the same time, I glanced across, nodded, perhaps waved, wished our cats would stop disgracing themselves amongst his lettuces and hoped he would wander over.
Eventually he did just that, I straightened up smiling in happy anticipation as he walked towards my rather, ramshackle, freeform, postmodernist plot. (He will say something, he has to say something about the beans) I mentally dared him not to give me some acknowledgment.
We exchanged the few pleasantries that not understanding a word each other was saying would allow. Tommy didn't even glance at my magnificent beans, in fact he behaved as if he had developed some kind of temporary bean blindness. All that happened was that as he turned to leave, he pointed at a row of lettuce seedlings that had become a bit too close for either comfort or productivity and conveyed in no uncertain terms (all the time looking me straight in the eye) that they required thinning out, yesterday. He returned at a measured pace back to his own plot. As I stared at his back I was so reminded of my Grandad Fred, I nearly wept.
By ayesha christmas from Slovenia EU
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