Things are slowly moving quickly here at the new house..
You find time for little jobs.  You pace yourself.
This morning I took a little walk up our slice of mountainside.  It is terraced for allotments and fruit trees so officially it is farmland however, it is too overgrown to be classified as such so it needed clearing.  Three oldsters have spent a week hacking at the vegetation with chainsaws and now it looks much better and feels lighter.  Walking around the piles of sliced trees looking down at the blue roof I get a strange familiar feeling: it’s that feeling you get when you are on holiday and you are staying somewhere really nice…  But of course, I’ll be starting work in a couple of hours and as soon as that thought slides into my head my pleasant illusion disappears.  Nevertheless, I still enjoy the rest of my little walk and when I arrive back at the garden I decide to sort out the compost bin.

Compost bins here are set into the ground and you put all food waste into it, cooked or not.  Into this mixture you sprinkle special Japanese bacteria that breaks down the food into a manure-type product.  I picked a spot and started digging.  I wanted a hole around a metre wide and 2 foot deep.  The sun was hot and I was sweaty.  I realised too late that the position of the hole wasn’t good so I made the decision to dig another one just next to it, closer to the stone wall.  Mid-way through shovelling I noticed yellow chunks of vegetables amongst the soil.  Looking closer I realised the chunks were in fact ginger.  I sifted through the soil and pulled out the rest of the chunks and ginger roots then fitted the compost bin into the hole and packed soil around it.

(How interesting can a compost bin really be?)

I rinsed the ginger and left it to dry on a basket…  It looked like a giant nugget of gold.
Later that day, someone visited us and noticed the chunks drying in the sun.  “That’s tumeric”, and it was.  The previous owner of the house was growing tumeric and it had been covered up and forgotten.

I think I’ll put some back in the ground because it’s a nice thing to grow.