#idefixgreenpaw

It’s springtime and it’s about time you tidied up and got into gear. 

Here’s a quick how to springtime guide for a September Sunday morning.  It will leave you feeling just as blissed out as the long black and pastry at your favourite wankjob cafe after your Sunday morning lesmills spin class - without the shame and guilt about your constant underuse of your membership and the entirely embarrassing music choices, speak and demeanour of the spin instructor, who is high on the wellness life in a really yuck way. 

But let’s take it step by step. 

Step One

Line the sides of the planter box you whipped up on Saturday afternoon after picking up some rough sawn timber during your Saturday morning trip to the timberyards with some black plastic sheets.  This is the warm up. Stretch those hammies. Set a goal to have the box filled by midday. 

Step Two

Proceed to fill the box with bits of windfallen willow that has been rotting away next to the hayshed in a big puddle for about a year or so.  They are waterlogged and heavy, so you’ll start to work up a sweat wheelbarrowing them around. 

Step Three

Top the rotten wood with rotten silage that went off because you forgot to electric tape the horses off it when you pushed them into the paddock where the silage is stored late one night and they bit holes into the plastic wrapper. There is a lot of plastic involved in this process - a bit like at lesmills. It will take a while to wheelbarrow the smelly, slimey silage through the boggy paddock to your box.  Breathe as required. 

Step Four

Sprinkle the top of the silage with horse shit and ashes from your woodburner.  Collecting the horse shit requires a lot of shovelling. Your arms will get the idea.

Step Five

Top with more horse shit and grass clippings from your quick lawn mowing interlude. The sun is now out and it is hot. Drink some water. You will need to push the wheelbarrow though the mud to find all this horse shit, which takes a while and is tiring.  Not anywhere as annoying as a lesmills instructor though. 

Step Six

You made it.  It’s lunchtime. You can now top it all off with some veggie compost mix from the garden centre.  Bend your knees - these sacks are heavy.  Recommended that you buy enough so you can actually cover the whole surface.  Plant your strawberries and feel the afterglow for at least an hour. 

It occurred to me the other day that one of my friends shares a first name with Stalin.  Oh what that must be like. Surely you would just constantly have to answer questions about how that feels and whether you share a great aunt with the man. In any event this occurrence marks the perfect time to introduce the first post in the ‘before and after’ series (where you see a picture of something in its current state now, and then wait eagerly for the time when you can see the same thing in its future state, which you will have to wait for because the future cannot be rushed):  

the brown onion patch:

We have been having a firm spring, meaning a steady interchange of rain and sun. Here is hoping these brown onion plants will like that as much as Stalin liked his wine.  

Staying with a theme of planned economies, below Idefix is modelling a combination of corn, scarlet runner beans and yellow dwarf beans.  The plan is that the runner beans grow up the corn and the three plants support each other perfectly in a mutually beneficial system of sharing and caring. You will want to know if this works, because now that Grimes is reading the Communist Manifesto, anything could happen.  Maybe even the end of neoliberalism. Maybe. Watch this space.