A Burglar in the Garden

Yesterday evening was an interesting evening.

On Saturday morning Amber, Kenzie and I had headed to an early morning market about 30 minutes south of us. Among our purchases we had several plants; some parsley, some mint, some tomatoes and a chilli plant that had been given to us despite protests that we’d never eat the chillies. We hoped to put them in our garden or some pots (We hadn’t really thought beyond ‘We want a herb garden, let’s buy some herbs’) and didn’t realise until we got home that we had neither pots or tools with which to garden. There was a brief escapade with one of our kitchen utensils by Amber, but the soil turned out to be too hard. So we put them in the fridge and left it for a day.

Fast-forward to Sunday afternoon. We’ve just left a cafe we’ve sat in for a few hours, more for the internet than the drinks, and Amber and Kenzie are planning to catch a songtaow to an evening service while I’m heading home with the noble intention of lesson planning, writing emails, doing my washing and other such mundane week-end trivia.

Get home, hop in shower, hop out, put on clean clothes, throw nasty-dirty-smelly clothes in the wash, bring all my work downstairs and then...

Perhaps I’ll put the sprinkler on. I bet the grass could use some water. 

In my defence, it actually doesn’t rain here outside the wet season (Not entirely true, but it is viewed as a freak incident if it does, and it’s only happened twice since the beginning of the cold season) and that finished early November. And while it might not feel hot compared to the other seasons (This being cold season) it still reaches at least 20˚. So no water equals dead plants.

Huh. Guess Amber moved the plants out here this morning. They’re looking close to dead And there’s where she tried to dig up the soil. This bit looks greener. Maybe if I...

...soak the soil to soften it, then grab one of the big cooking spoons and carefully cut into the dirt and scoop it out, then put in the herbs, those chillies and the tomatoes...

Yes Emma. Very good idea. Right up until you’re putting in the third plant set and it starts to get dark.

Argh. Mosquitoes. Everywhere. Arrrrggggghhhhhh...

By this point I had remembered my mother’s teachings on putting new plants in the ground and had gotten a good system going. Soak, wait, dig, scoop, crumble soil, put in a layer, make finger holes, put plants in finger holes, more soil and gently pat down. It became slightly chaotic with the third lot as I realised it would soon be too dark to see. The ‘wait’ part was abandoned, so instead of nice crumbly soil I got horribly wet clay-like lumps that took more tearing than rubbing to separate and conspired to make me abominably muddy. I was swatting at mosquitoes as well, and left nice brown hand-prints in my vengeful wake. I’m sure I have more bites from that dusky half-hour than from the rest of my time here.

Then Kenzie and Amber arrived home. Turned out they’d been unable to get a songtaow, but had managed to find a big bag of soil for 25 bhat.

Thank goodness.

We put the soil and the tomato plants in a cut up milk bottle, and decided it was high time to go back inside. Guess what happened next?

Yeah, I totally managed to lock us all out of our house at 6.30 in the evening. Back door and front. Keys, phones and anything else useful all inside.

Trying to get the doors open with a driving licence was not a success; whoever put our doors in put them the right way round. None of the downstairs windows were open.

“I think I left my window open.” Kenzie said. Amber thought the same of her windows, so up onto our porch roof Kenzie went and towards the bedrooms.

“Don’t worry,” Amber told me, “Kenzie’s a monkey. She’ll be fine.”

Urk. I hope so. “Ok. I’ll go and try the back again. If in doubt, break it!”

So as Kenzie gracefully leapt around our rooftop I tried to see if I could stick my hand through the window and get the door handle. Some of the windows here aren’t single panes but a series of horizontal panes that can be tilted up and down, like a set of glass shutters. This back door set was tilted up, so I had a bit of room to manoeuvre. There was the issue of the fly-screen though. If in doubt, break it. I’ll just...push, and see if it opens.

It did, a bit. Opened the wrong way though. If we get rid of the glass we can just climb through...

Amber and Kenzie had been replacing glass at school from windows of the same design as this one; I called them over and together we removed enough of the panes to push the fly screen the whole way open, though it would take time to get all the panes off and I still couldn’t reach the door handle. Turns out however that the fly-screens on windows have a removal-friendly design. These little pins hold one side to the hinges on the wall, so if you push these pins up an out the whole screen comes off. Arm twisted through the window, bottom pin removed, fly-screen pushed out my way and I could turn the handle.

The rest of the evening was spent laughing about the whole thing and hearing Kenzie recount the time she had to break into her house in Nebraska. Amber showed me how to adjust the back door lock so I wouldn’t shut myself (And everyone else) out.

I got absolutely no work done that evening.

Still, we’ve got our garden going.