Loved it, loved it, loved it! I could go into a whole lot of detail here, but why ruin the sheer bliss for anyone else reading this beautiful book. It's chatty, it's about the simple things in life that matter and I'll say it again - I loved it. ( )

Organised into four chapters named for the seasons, Six Square Metres is the warts-and-all story of Margaret Simon’s tiny garden in inner-suburban Melbourne. It is not a garden that can conform to expert advice because its location means that there is very little sunlight in the back garden and she is reduced to growing shade-tolerant vegies in raised beds while growing more demanding plants in pots that live on her roof. Many of her plants sulk because they are not only planted in the wrong kind of environment – she is always hopeful that she will be able to break the rules of gardening – but also because she neglects them when she is busy. (Simons is one of Australia’s very best freelance journalists. I’ve reviewed one of her books here).
The sulky plants in her garden are due to a combination of what she calls her culpable neglect and general incompetence – but she is unrepentant:

…gardening books are to gardening what childcare books are to babies, pornography to sex, Home Beautiful magazine to housing, and a literal reading of the Bible to Christianity. Counsels of perfection don’t work for me. I am too messy. I am not a fundamentalist. My edges are not clipped; my tomatoes sprawl unpruned and unstaked. (p.5)

Simons has the same problems as we do with zucchini: the first few humble little ones are a joy to eat, but we soon get sick of ratatouille, zucchini fritters, zucchini cake, and zucchini muffins – and likewise we also don’t care to stuff marrows from when zucchini have been left to grow monstrous and fat like overgrown phallic symbols. (However I don’t feel this way about excess tomatoes or pumpkins, because they store well, and our current crop of excess cucumbers is making an excellent pickle.)
Yet despite these challenges she finds the garden a comfort in a crazy world and she considers herself a failure if she has to buy vegetables from a shop.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/02/28/six-square-metres-reflections-from-a-small-g... ( )