Greetings growers 🌻❤

My garden, a mystical place that is green and serene , potatoes grow as far as eye can see ... Two legendary stone headed guardians protect this land - Luno and Titus.


![IMG_20221112_173606.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/aiden.space.bar/23w2eTKamahf3vsSmsDzbjF6akaU9uJYchHePq9Yg3cRKjQXWM8EcC9HX8E9QzjpB2nJF.jpg)
 





![IMG_20221112_173704.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/aiden.space.bar/23yJGFYacKWRQYsjymgffRLQvi3GxJX9kDgAePrViNMQ3hAYWPziUrwf9vMXe24pBsEwR.jpg)


😌 Thank you for the opportunity. 

Kind regards. 
Aiden.space.bar 

I have a really unusual garden habit.  Seems like every few weeks I walk out the back door and stop.  I look. I pinch myself.  And then I mutter....  "*Bloody hell!  It's fruiting AGAIN??!!*"

The mulberry.  This poor little tree gets very little care beyond my hacking back the branches so I don't poke my eyes out on the way to the rubbish bin.  And an occasional pot of coffee grounds tossed carelessly its way. 

I harvest the leaves mercilessly for tea.  It gets watered rather a lot from what I think is a hole in a drain pipe somewhere, cos that part of the garden has mosss all year round. 😄

The general wisdom for this part of the world (northern Thailand) is that a mulberry will fruit 2 to maybe 3 times per year. 

Mine?  6,7 and just finished her 8th crop.  My freezer is overflowing.  LOL.  

Definitely there are peak crops and kinda afterthought, "why not?" crops - more like a dribble than a burst.  But my overwhelming thought is that it's UNUSUAL!!  


![MarchGarden2.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/artemislives/23xVKAf2S9Y5LC8dgeKHDB3YFqU6Y2WeGWvmGMRnjj4iEZhB2y9rUbYeKR4g5MGHTKo7q.jpg)


![MulberryTea5 (2).jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/artemislives/23yd1qx9FDozkxDtd3qPv9XSv7heKGP1Wo3VosctKxmafPpgErNVzNcqH5dFD16s6mVaS.jpg)

Grateful, blessed but still continually marveling at this really UNUSUAL garden event.  

An unusual event happen in my small garden at home just recently. My newly planted bell pepper seedlings strangely vanished, what was left was the middle part down to the root. No other trace, not even a single leaf. So I did a little detective work. 

At first, I suspected that the goats around might have eaten it all because they could easily get in since our house fence is no good. I even throw small stones at the goats for them to go far away ( how rude, right?) I was just pissed off.

When I went back to the house, my 4-year-old son, Cedrick, with scissors in his hand, excitedly told me " come, mama, weeds there..." ( he could not speak fluently yet😊) He pointed to the garbage bin. 

To cut the story short, I have finally found the culprit. It was my son who cut my precious bell pepper plants off and throw them away. 😥

I just hug him. It's my fault. I always let him help me in cleaning and cutting the weeds off in our small garden. So, he cuts off everything! 😅

**I wasn't sure about sharing this, but I was thinking first of this story... then after reading @fotostef's post, thought it was such a coincidence!**

Back when I lived in Findhorn village, near the big spiritual community - my nextdoor neighbour asked me to pop into her garden whilst she was away for the afternoon, because the last of the baby ducks that she had was very poorly... The others in that litter had already passed on (all had been very weak) and she had hopes for this one, taking very good care of it, but it was fading away... 
I went out after I knew she'd left the house, and sat next to the wee thing, praying over it and wishing it well, and guiding it to pass on as and when was right for it...
The sun was going further down, and the wee thing was failing, evidently. I watched over the wee sweetheart until he passed... and a particularly poignant thing occurred: just as he seemed to take his last wee breath, all the surrounding cacophony of birdsong and animal noises (we were in the middle of a big row of gardens between fishermen's cottages) ***went completely silent.*** 

I held my breath... and a few seconds later, everything started up again; the consistent buzz of a multitude of wildlife. I was awed indeed. Maybe if I hadn't been so tuned in to the little one, it might not have registered, but for ALL the wildlife to suddenly be quiet and then stay quiet for some moments - it was astonishing, truly.

I also felt very emotional as I cared for the duckling dying, as I have felt with any animal I've cared for who has passed in my presence: a strong sense of their letting go of accumulated charge or all the feeling they've built up in their lives - or that they've absorbed from us. It felt strange to be so very affected by such a wee creature that I hadn't known well personally, but it was a blessing.

**And on the subject of #planttheft, which seems prevalent around the world...! I bought my house here in this Italian medieval quarter when the whole place was relatively abandoned: I bought it for a minimal sum, which suited my 'budget' and I renovated it on literally no funds, so every cent I did spend meant a great deal.**

Having no garden initially, I created a beautiful raised bed 'street garden': just about 3 m long by 60 cm or so deep - and running down the steps, getting higher as the steps get lower... anyways; I made huge efforts digging up hard soil from abandoned gardens below, and taking cuttings, wild plants, seeds, flowers etc, to fill it :-D 


One of the ONLY bought plants that I planted, was this wee thyme - pot-bound and happy to be set into the new soil beside it's new neighbours. I went out to check it the day after planting, and someone had uprooted it completely - you know how a plant tightly rooted into its pot can easily be pulled up before its roots have taken hold... I WAS LIVID!! It was SUCH A MEAN THING TO DO - and this ONE PLANT that I'd spent a *most precious* couple of Euros on!! I had no income at the time, and this was meant as a truly big addition to my kitchen and bathroom, as food and medicine!

I was well connected on mainstream social media back in those days: I put out a post, recording the incident and asking the community to call the culprit out and get them to replace it: folks were pretty cynical about that working, but I knew that it had to be one of the old ladies who tootle by for early morning mass every day: no-one else used the Via at that time! I knew that someone must've seen them walking up the street with a herb plant in their hands! And if they were a church person, then they'd have to feel some tinge of having done wrong!

The thyme turned up again the next day!! Dumped rather unceremoniously on the street garden bed, but nevertheless, I replanted it and it grew happily for many years. I was very glad to have called the theft out, and have used mainstream social media as a tool like this many times in the past, to get the collective to correct a wrongdoing. :-) 

When I first moved into my new house, there were a few flowers, but most I planted myself. When summer came everything was flowering in purple! The plants that were already there as well as new ones I planted thinking I’m planting blue and white, everything was purple. I thought someone cast a purple spell on me and my garden 😉💙

*Well the most unusual thing in the farm, that I can think of, happened a few months ago. I wrote about it in [this post](https://peakd.com/hive-140635/@fotostef/a-little-incident) so I'll just copy myself and put it here too!*

-----------

![IMG_8958.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/fotostef/23wqiGZamWpbfmuGoF4xDJoBXNuznPPXYjYSoojZBMn2DHVQgYeSA2MprCSC2GdQ4V2pm.jpg)

I was at the herb garden, yesterday, and the most extraordinary thing happened. In the beginning everything looked normal. The few vegetables that we finally planted among the herbs, are growing, I was checking for any flaws at the irrigation system and a little sparrow was casually sitting on a path. So far so good.

When I came near to the sparrow, she moved away with small leaps (I took an arbitrary decision to refer to the little bird as a she). I figured that she might has hurt her wing, or something and I continued my work a bit further. But a few minutes later I was again in front of her, having done a big circle and approaching from the other side. This time she was hardly moving.

It was obvious that she had a problem and I sat on the ground, right next to her, trying to figure out what I could do to help. She was breathing heavily, as heavy as it can be the breathing of a tiny bird, and as I was about to take her into my hand, she had one last breath, I think it is called a death rattle and just died.

I know that it was just a small bird that I had never seen before and what I am about to say will sound silly, but I felt tears in my eyes and a heaviness on my heart. Obviously I didn't took any pictures, it didn't even cross my mind. I just sat there, looking at her lifeless body and thinking

*what are the odds, of witnessing something like that?*

I kept thinking of that tiny creature, even after I buried her and returned home. Was it a sign and if yes, what could it mean? Was it just a random episode of life with no specific meaning? I really can't tell. Anyway I am lousy on reading the signs but I know that this little incident, somehow felt important. Probably that's why I took my camera today to create a few images that felt fitting and I am writing all about it!