Mama is a thief. Well, more a perpetrator really. She carries nasturtium seeds, and others, in all of her jacket pockets and then surreptitiously (love that word today) sneaks the seeds into unsuspecting planters all over Rome and Collioure. In front of houses. Next to stores. In the marketplace. Over a fence into the neighbors’ yards! She pops a few into the large rose containers that dot the landscape in this tiny town and miracolo!!! Lovely multi-coloured flowers hang over the sides of the planter all summer long. On our street, she pushes seeds down into the earth next to a garbage can holder, and sometimes (she has told me this), she simply buys a packet of seeds and just throws them from the car as she and papa speed along the highway. Natural beautification, she calls it. According to another website, this kind of planting is just another way to say “seed bombing”!
When papa and mama were trying to get their finally-finished house approved in Los Angeles, they had to show that a hillside had been planted for erosion and what did they do? They bought a BOX of arugula seeds (do you know how many seeds are in a BOX—about fifty gazillion, that’s how many)—and sowed the whole hillside with arugula, which comes up really fast. They only had about three days to show the planting and up it came, covering the hillside with SALAD for all the neighbourhood.
Years after this, neighbors were still asking where on earth all the arugula all over their property had come from–haha, I love that!
What you don’t know, perhaps, is that I adore arugula and munch on it whenever I find it in our garden, especially the wild kind, which is a bit peppery and has all sorts of anti-oxidants in its leaves, whatever anti-oxidants are…
So I can see that glint in mama’s eye right now. She’s about to make a trip to Botanic, our garden store, and get more seeds and also some of that great composted straw that she strews all over the garden and which is, for me, a HUGE cat box!!!
Don’t worry, I choose my little toilette place and stick to it, but I’m happy in the knowledge that seeds around my area will love my contribution to their fertility and probably be the prettiest in the yard!
See what I told you! My little…er…you know…”place”…is right under this rose.
