Morning all!
Let's head into the garden, get a Japanese book rec, and learn a fun fact about the mammal that most resembles a potato.
Hello all!
Hope you have had a lovely couple of weeks, and the Easter break treated you all well. I think Spring is actually trying to appear-there was even a couple of days last week where it didn’t rain and was sunny all day-madness!
This week, we are heading outside, but just outside your door as I talk about the little thing of planting potatoes.
Let’s grab a cuppa and take 5 minutes to focus on the little things! ☕
Mel xxx
P.S Want to be part of growing the newsletter? Look for more details on how you can get involved at the bottom of the post 💙
Planting potatoes
Today we plant potatoes.
The seed potatoes have been in the shed for a few weeks, chosen from a local garden centre, sitting upright like spaceships in their eggbox container. Now, they’ve began to shoot upwards and it is time to plant.
We take them from the shed, and place them on the garden table. We plant in bags, the garden a work in progress. The bag of compost is tipped into the planter, and the air permeates with the smells of earth, vegetation and the outdoors.
I spread the compost in the bag with my hands and feel connected to the earth. I’m from a family of gardeners, growing up around flower shows and endless crops of potatoes, strawberries and rhubarb. I hope that green fingers are real, passed down each generation, and that one day my fingers too will bud and burst into green shoots.
We nestle the seed potatoes amongst the soil, shoots upwards, before adding more compost over the top, concealing them until they are ready to burst forth as fully grown potato plants.
I think forward to days when the potatoes are ready, a curiosity of what the harvest will bring and how they will taste, mashed and seasoned with pepper and garlic, or boiled and dripping in butter.
But for now we must be patient. Their time will come.
What I’ve been reading
Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda
I love Japanese fiction, and this book absorbed me from start to finish- I could not stop reading!
The book follows competitors as they take part in a prestigious piano competition in a small village just outside of Tokyo. We follow the stories of multiple competitors, all from different backgrounds, from child prodigy to the student breaking all the rules. We learn about each in tender detail, understand their pasts and how they are all connected through their love of music.
This book uses language like no other. It transports you into the world of the concert hall, leaving you feeling like you’ve heard the recitals yourself.
The perfect read to just sink into-simply beautiful.
Get your copy via Bookshop.org
And finally….a weird animal fact!
Wombats are essentially the potatoes of the animal kingdom.
But did you know, their butts are a form of defence?
When threatened, they dive into their homes, sticking their butt out of the entrance of the burrow. Their butt has lots of hard cartilage and very short fur, making a barrier between them and their predators, with a resistance to scratches and nothing that a predator can grab onto.
Their rears can even crush predators’ skulls if necessary!
What little things are you enjoying?
I want to hear from you!
For future newsletters, I’m planning on including a little thing from one of you guys each week alongside the regular content.
It could be anything, from something you saw on a walk, to that great hot chocolate you had, to finally beating that boss on a game you’ve been stuck on for ages.
If you’d like to share yours, then comment below or send me a message. They will be anonymised.
Can’t wait to see what you all are enjoying!
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it-feel free to let me know what you think, and what you’d like to see in future editions. If you know someone else who would like it, please share and let’s grow the newsletter!
Can’t wait to hear from you, and have a great day! ☀️