Onion bed raided, Potatoes up-rooted

So there I was wondering what I was going to do with all my onions and potatoes. It looks like I may not have a problem after all, since someone has raided the garden. Gulam has said that he only grows things that the rabbits don't eat. I wonder if he has any suggestions for plants that don't attract the two legged variety of attacker.


Onion bed raided

I thought that it would be good to weed out all of the onion beds, and as I was doing so a Kurdish woman passed me smiled and shook her finger, and made a motion by putting her forfinger and thumb together and simulating the pulling out of a weed ( at least that is what I think she was doing, it might have been some obscene gesture at the infidel) then she wagged her finger from side to side and shook her head as if to say NO!!! weeding is a bad idea. When I walked around the plots I noticed many of the onion beds were not weeded. Perhaps they were using the weeds as a camoflage to protect their onions from robbers. Perhaps they have learnt from experiance.

But onions were not enough, if you are a robber and need a stew then some nice new potatoes are just the job. But robbers are not gardeners and they don't observe if the potatoes are in flower they have no way of knowing how big the potatoes in the ground are. If the leaves are big and green then there must be potatoes there RIGHT? WRONG!!!


Potatoes up rooted

The potatoes are still very small, I expect it will be the end of the month before they are ready. When I looked at the potato shaws they were still fresh. They had not withered away so my guess is that the raid was made early in the morning. And the small potatoes were just perfect, not a blemish on their skins. If they were not good enough for the robbers, they were certainly good enough for me, so I gathered them up and took them home and I will have them in a soup.

There is one thing to be positive about... they were not destructive. Last year I wrote about the hooliganism and vandalism that resulted in tool boxes being thrown in the ditches. The police can not or will not do anything about it, which makes you wonder about the function of the "law". I took these two snapshots of the damage done. I wonder if God took a snapshot of the culprits and put it in his filing cabinet under the heading "thou shall not steal"

On the subject of stealing I came across a German discussion on Flickr about a man called Werner Wattwurm who copied other peoples photos and passed them off as his own. He would take a misty morning shot from the smokey moutains and flip it over and then call it Brocken the highest mountain in North Germany. He did this with countless photos and gained the praise and admiration of the german community on Flickr, and now it turns out that he was a fraudster. It is quite shattering when hidden things come to the light.

But the strange thing is the man had impeccable taste. It is stupid of me to say this but I once called my wife to come and admire his wonderful pictures. I envied him the sights he had seen. It was as though God had allowed him to capture all the glory of nature, and I felt privileged to be able to see the things he had seen, all of creation singing a song of praise

There was a whole series that he said he had taken when out riding his bike, and I thought to myself, if you don't get out then you don't see the rain or the clouds or the storms or the colours in the sky, so I was inspired to go out into the forest for walks to be surprised by beauty.

From the comments he used to get on his "photos" I am sure lots of people also felt that way, and now it turns out many of his photos he just copied and fliped from webshots. Should I feel cheated by what he did, well no actually it makes me smile.

So for some reason I am in a benevolent mood at the moment, perhaps it is God's grace. So to the person who stole the fruits of my hard labour. I hope you enjoyed those onions. I know I would have.