The Magic Red Hat

OK, so I said I would post a picture when it was done, and here it is! My first ever completed knitting project! I'm very proud. It's simply two rectangles (not even measured properly or the same size really) joined together, so the corners make these cute little ears.

Next project: one for me!

I am woman!

Today, I felt good. No, actually, I felt awesome. I felt strong. I felt capable. I was impressed with myself. Is it OK to say that? Does it sound egotistical? It's a shame that in this world it is frowned upon to praise yourself, that it is often considered being "full of ones' self" or arrogant. Well, I don't care, today I will praise myself, coz I feel I deserve it. So should you, you probably did something awesome recently too. Go for it!

OK, so the praiseworthy moment of my day came when I was walking up the ramp to the train station at Preston Market, carrying Indi in the Ergo, feeding her while I walked, pulling my trolley full of organic fruit and vegies and nuts and smoked salmon and (OK, getting distracted by the food... Must... stay... on... track.... - I'm really hungry at the moment, can you tell...) yeah and catching the train and well I just felt like a pretty damned good mother to be out and about like that, doing our shopping to feed us good healthy food, bringing it home without using up any fossil fuels, carrying my baby and feeding her while I walked. It felt good. I felt proud of myself. I spent so many years being so critical of who I was and what I was doing, so many years, that now that I am in a place in my life where I am really *proud* of myself, am really happy with what I am doing and how I am doing it, I just felt it needed to be said. To be proclaimed.

So I did.

My Crunchy Boy

Well we have had a big adventure these last three days. Not an external adventure, not overland, but an adventure of the heart, a feline adventure of the spirit.

This wonderful creature you see pictured here, the wonderful Mysterious Crunch as he is called, has been the main protagonist of this tale. A little background on him might set the scene nicely. Crunchy is called Crunchy because about a month after Indi was born, in the middle of the night, Mat and I would hear a definite crunching coming from the kitchen area where Dr Chops' food is kept. This was an unusual sound, since Dr Chops swallows his dry food whole. Another way we could tell that it wasn't Dr Chops is coz we could see Dr Chops sleeping at the foot of our bed. A couple of times I caught this new renegade out, and saw a white-ish cat from behind as he scooted out the back door at the sound of my footsteps (we keep the back door bolted a little ajar, to let Dr Chops satisfy his urge to romp about at night). So this continued for a while. Once to my utter surprise, I found Dr Chops and Crunchy (then unnamed) asleep together on the couch on our front porch when I got home! Crunchy ran away as soon as he saw me, still very shy. Then one day Mat found Crunchy asleep in his studio, the room right next to the back door, on the couch. I was secretly thrilled! I employed my very best cat etiquette and slowly, ever so slowly, inched my way inside the door to the studio. I made sure not to make direct eye contact, used lots of slow blinks and projected my energy just right, and soon enough I was patting my new white and tan friend, who was purring loudly! So friendly! Almost too friendly! Before I knew it he was climbing on to my lap, trying to almost suck the pats out of me... it was like he was starving for some love, poor poppet! What a sweetie. From that day on he has been living with us, sharing mealtimes with Dr Chops and winning us over with his big heart. He lets Indi pat him with her over-eager fat little hands, as she grasps and pulls at his fur, squealing with joy, and he just sits there, as though he understands that this is what kids are like. He seems to really love her actually.

So that's Crunchy. Eats like a horse. Big heart. Lovely person.

Three nights ago as Crunchy got off his usual couch right by the heater, where he sprawls for hours at a time, I noticed he was limping horribly, and basically couldn't put any weight on his left back leg. Upon closer examination I could see his toe was very swollen and misshapen. He was lurching around in a really upsetting way, and obviously distressed. He also wasn't eating, which for Crunchy is a BIG DEAL. He usually eats as much as I am prepared to put down in front of him. He has developed a lovely little paunch in the five months or so that he has been with us. So anyway, we decided to keep him inside til I could take him to the vet, despite Crunchy really really wanting to go outside. Unfortunately Mat accidently let him out while he was letting Dr Chops in, which he felt really bad about when our friend told him that cats usually gang up on weak sick cats, and that Crunchy would be in real danger out there. Poor Crunchy!!

I walked the streets calling his name, twice that night, but nothing. I kept getting up in the middle of the night to check, but no Crunchy. I actually felt ill I was so worried for him, and felt guilty that I hadn't bundled him up right away to the vets, that I could have prevented this. (In reality I was juggling a baby, a cat, visitors, a grumpy reluctant husband and a billion other things.) It wasn't very abnormal for him to be out all night, or even til late morning. It was when the sun was setting the next day and no sign of Crunchy that I really began to worry.

But it was weird. By the end of the day both Mat and I had this odd inner sense, a deep intuition, that things were OK. That things were as they should be. That if he had died fighting in the night, that Crunchy had died as he had lived, a free spirit, true to his inner nature, fighting til the end. He's a tough cat, and it was a fitting departure. It was weird for two people who love their animals truly and deeply to be acting so calm about the disappearance of one so dear and cherished. But we were.

By the second night, we had pretty much accepted his death as being certain. It had been a cold and rainy two days, the coldest of the winter yet, and there was no way he would have stayed out knowing there was a warm place with food for him to come, especially when he was in pain. So I went to bed with Indi, feeding her to sleep as per usual. After a few minutes Mat pokes his head in the door and whispers to me "Guess who just walked in the door?" and my eyes almost fell out of my head they opened so wide! I grinned, and poor Indi lay there blinking as I whisked my breast out of her mouth and ran to the kitchen, where dear little Crunchy was scoffing down as much food as he could. He glanced up at me, blinked me a smile, then kept eating hungrily. I almost cried with relief! I got him some more food and then crouched next to him, repeating his name with love and relief, over and over, and when he was done (the picture above was taken just after he finished eating) I picked him up and carried him to a spot right in front of our heater, on a soft futon. He purred for a while as I patted him with love, and fell right asleep, no washing of his face or anything. I was so amazed. It was like looking at a ghost. I had been sure he was dead! He slept in that spot til morning, when we took him to the lovely kind vet, who washed his sore abscessed foot, gave him a painkiller and some antibiotics.

He's still recovering, still sleeping a lot, and his foot still looks pretty bad, but he's back, with us, in a warm place where he is loved and cared for.

My little angel

OK, this is gonna be a bit of a gush, a bit of a self indulgent ramble about how much I absolutely adore my little girl, my little princess! (Although if blogging itself isn't self indulgent I don't know what is!) She is just the most beautiful thing I have even encountered, ever laid eyes on, and I've seen a few beautiful things in my time, let me tell you! Really, it just blows me away how absolutely perfect and wonderful she is, in form, in spirit, in every way. She has eclipsed our lives totally and utterly! Both Mat and I are truly smitten. She has us squarely in the palm of her fat little squishy hand! Those hands!! Is there anything more adorable than the hand of your baby child, those triangular fingers so fat at the base, the softness, so plump she can't even really bend them properly, it's just too adorable for words.

At the moment she is sleeping. So contentedly. She got to sleep fairly easily tonight, it's been a big day, with two lots of lovely visitors to our house to entertain and enlighten her, and not-very-long sleeps throughout the day. She was rubbing her little eyes while I cooked, patiently sitting in her dads arms while I chopped and stirred, and continued to rub while I held her in one arm and added spices and stirred with the other. I just wanted to get our lovely beef stew on the boil so it could simmer and cook away while I lay with my beautiful baby and helped her into her night of rest and rejuvenation. So she can grow. And learn. Those are her two jobs in life really, to grow and to learn, that's all she has to do, and she is doing them very well, thank you very much! She has been doing them since she was born, she's a natural!

She really is such a spritely little thing, she has such a good sense of humour! I just love love love love love (did I mention I love?) the way she will raise her fat little hands to her mouth and giggle away whenever she sees me being silly or doing a funny dance or making a funny face - she makes me do the silliest of things! And I love being silly for her! We laugh together and really share the joy of the moment, our eyes locked and linked in shared happiness, pure exuberance! I find myself doing the craziest of dances, or repeating nonsensical phrases over and over, simply because they elicited a smile or a laugh from my beautiful queen. I used to think she was the princess and I the queen, but no, she is really the queen! She has so much power, she dictates what will happen, when it will happen, how it will happen, and never lets us forget it! And I, joyfully, am her willing subject, her court jester, who will do anything to make her beautiful heart smile, and to see that smile shine out of her gorgeous face.


This is what life is about!

The Art of the Knit

Well I seem to have stumbled upon a huge secret world... well, secret to me until I stumbled upon it, at which point I realised it is a BIG thing - yes, knitting. It's *massive*. Lots of people knit. Really ugly stuff. Some people knit cool stuff. I wanna be one of those people.

So yes, I recently taught myself how to knit, again (about the third time...) and am currently making a magic red hat for my little sweet thing Indigo to wear when it's freezing outside. This is my first ever proper knitting project. When it is finished and I can call myself an accomplished knitter, I intend to widen my creative horizons and make more interesting stuff, like toys and creatures and other cute things. There is actually a Japanese thing called Amigurumi (don'tchya love the Japanese?!) which are tiny little super cute creatures, usually crocheted but often knitted, and yes, they are tiny, and yes, they are super cute, here have a look...


Seee? I wanna make a cute little Amigurumi pear! Or three!





And a mushroom with a cutey little face...

And a little teensy weensy cyclops... every little girl needs her own teensy weensy liddle cyclops to cuddle...


So yes, I am enjoying this new phase of creativity in my life. It's nice.

I'm also quite impressed with knitting itself, knitting as an art form, knitting as a craft. I'm quite impressed that anyone ever came up with it. If everyone in history was as lazy as I am, we would all be sitting around under trees shivering, trying to wrap leaves or bark around us to keep warm. It amazes me that someone actually took some wool (OK it amazes me that the wool was ever taken OFF the sheep and then stretched and spun into yarn... I mean, it's really quite cheeky when you think of it, stealing a sheep's wool, but quite ingenious!), OK so they take the wool, the yarn, and then they take these two sticks, and figure out how to wrap and weave the yarn around these two here sticks, and keep wrapping and weaving and wrapping and weaving, until they end up with a jumper! Freaky! Coz it's really quite complicated in a super simple kind of way. What I mean is, once you know how to knit it's quite simple, but to have actually come up with the whole thing, well that just seems mightily impressive to me.

So as I knit away I feel connected to this amazing group of women who have not only developed but have passed on this wonderful technology from generation to generation, and it feels good, it feels good on a really deep level, to be doing this. What seems so wonderful to me is that it involves so many connected things - it's creativity, it's technical brilliance, but it's also about nurturing, yourself and others. When you make someone something they can wear, you're helping them be warm, you're helping them be well. Especially back in the time when you couldn't just pop down to Sportsgirl to pick up a jumper, back when if you wanted a jumper you had to bloomin' well knit yourself a jumper - the art of knitting was developed as a nurturing technology. Like cooking, another of my deepest joys. Both are fields that engage you on deeply creative levels, and which enable those around you to live richly, to be well. I don't think it's a coincidence that this new activity of mine mirrors one of my all time favourite of things to do. I think it says a lot about who I am, and what I like to do.

Going out and about

I'm just loving going out and about with Indi these days in this amazing Autumn weather, cold yet not too cold, and so full of colour. I pop her in the Ergo, a wonderful carrier lent to me by a friend (thanks Sif!), and off we go on another mum and bub adventure. It's the kind of adventure that, if you're Indigo, you can fall asleep during! She's rocked about rhythmically as I walk, with her head leaning against her mumma's chest, tummy to tummy, warm as toast. It's so nice having her pressed against me, so close. I often wonder what it feels like for her - it looks like it would feel really lovely.
So some days we walk the local streets, with me admiring all the front yards and houses that we pass. This is something I truly love to do - I love the way a front yard just says so much about a household, about the people living there. I love observing the different plants people have collected, how they are arranged, cared for, how much effort has gone into it (or not, in many cases). I love my front yard, and spend a lot of time there, not just gardening but sitting out on our front porch on one of the two lovely big overstuffed chairs donated to us by our next door neighbour. Indigo and I spend a lot of time there, everyday. So I love it when I come across a front yard with furniture like a chair or a bench - it's amazing how it can transform a garden from a sterile place with a few plants to an inhabited outdoor 'room'. Just today I passed a row of pretty terrace houses, with tiny front yards, each with a small front verandah, and one of them had an orange retro looking upholstered chair, just a single seat, placed at an angle looking out on the street, and immediately I knew that whoever lived there just loved sitting there. I could feel that it was a spot where much enjoyment had taken place. It kind of hummed with it. It felt good. I think that's kind of what feng shui is about.
So yes she sleeps and gets her late morning nap while I walk and walk and walk - I have lost a bit of weight and am getting a really good idea of the terrain of our neighbourhood, getting a real sense of where we live. I like this. I used to wish we had a dog so I would be forced to walk more, but really there is nothing to stop me just stepping out for a little jaunt now and then. And all the better if I can do it while my lovely daughter sleeps soundly against my tummy (although my hips have been complaining a little as she gets heavier, I will have to get her used to the pram soon. I'm not really looking forward to it, she'll be so far away!)
Other days we go to the market, or the local shops, where she is more likely to be peering out from her comfy and safe perch, watching with wide eyes as the enormous and colourful and chattering world goes on around us. I love watching her in this mode, you can just tell she's taking so much in, processing so much, learning so much, just by observing, just by being there. And of course there are the countless people smiling with joy just at the sight of her, peering down at her and speaking baby talk to her. I used to kind of wish they would not get in her face so much but lately she is really lapping it up - she has been smiling back at them more and more often and winning them over completely!
It's actually quite amazing how much power she has. She opens people's hearts and brings people together just by being there. I always lose count of the number of people I end up chatting too as a result of wearing her around, and they are always the sweetest little encounters, tiny moments of shared joy as we all smile and share and love her, just for existing, just for being so goddamn cute!
I'm really loving it actually. I'm loving the sense of community that being a parent has brought to me. It's like a club, a huge, really huge club that exists, with free and automatic membership to each and every person who has ever been a parent. Mat and I noticed it right away. We are both fairly marginal people who have always dwelled on the fringes of society, never really fitting into the mainstream, or even many subgroups. Kind of a lonely place sometimes. But as soon as Indi was born, we instantly became members of this great club! We'd get smiles and nods everywhere we went, and still do. People give you more time to cross the street, are more likely to stop for you in the first place, if you are walking with your child, and they smile knowingly as you nod in thanks. It's a club that is totally unknown to you if you are childless - you can see all the people out there with kids, the sea of prams out on every shopping strip and cafe and playground, you can see them there, but you have no idea that they are all so connected, bound together by the invisible force of shared experience. And what an experience! The paradox of brutal difficulty combined with the sweetest of joys is completely unique and unmatchable by anything else.
There is a deepening in the eyes of these parents who I suddenly feel so connected to - you can see it as that knowing smile hits you. With that one look you can see that this person has already gone through what you are going through now. Even if the person is old and grey, you can see that they have not forgotten. You can see that they are kind of walking with you on this amazing journey, that the terrain is familiar to them, and that they know things about the road ahead of you that you don't know yet.
So we continue to walk, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes as a family when Mat joins us, and with each step we move forward on our amazing adventure together.

My Cat Eats Cake

And chocolate. Contrary to the panicky statements made by my cat loving friends that it is "bad for them!". "It's bad for you too," I say, "stop being such a finger wagging hypocrite." I don't give him much, he doesn't want much anyway. But I give him some. It seems mean to sit there eating delicious chocolate, with him sniffing around clearly interested, and not offer it. He is my friend after all. If you were sitting there with your best friend on the couch in front of the heater on a winter's night, enjoying each other's company, snuggling even depending on how close you and this friend were, and then you brought out a yummy stash of the finest organic chocolate laced with orange essence (or peppermint, both favourites in this house) and began eating it with relish, would you not offer your friend some? Would you continue eating your chocolate despite the pleading looks and suggestive motions of your friend? I think not. It would be rude. Well I think cats, and all our animal companions (I refuse to call them pets, that is so demeaning) deserve to be treated with the same respect one would give to a cherished human. Away with the double standard, I say! Even calling them "animal companions" is a bit daft, considering that I am also an animal, and therefore Mat could legitimately call me his animal companion. But then Peter Singer's coining of the term "non-human", although factually impeccable, is a bit humanocentric, despite it's attempts not to be. And "fluffy friend", although kinda nice, always makes people laugh at me, which doesn't quite work either. I don't know that there is an easy way out of this. So bear all of this in mind when I use the term "animal companion", please.
Anyway, back to the story of what my cat, Dr chops, eats. He eats chocolate, as I mentioned, but he also enjoys bits of cheese, and ham, and sliced turkey. Like all good food lovers he enjoys his deli goods. He also likes cream - he will tolerate milk if there is nothing else but only really the organic unhomogenised stuff, he won't touch regular milk. He likes KFC. When we are having an eggy fry up for breakfast he loves to have some runny egg yolk - I used to fry him up his own egg coz runny egg yolk is a favourite with everyone in this house. And tonight I discovered he likes coconut cake - a particularly yummy concoction I concocted up off the top of my head this afternoon (why it took me so long to combine the joys of coconut and vanilla I shall never know). He was licking the crumbs off the plate so I asked Mat to cut a thin slice for Dr Chops and crumble it for him. It's all gone now.
So my aim here is not really to showcase the gastronomic adventures of my wonderful spirit cat. I am actually making a point. A point about our animal companions. Humans have so successfully separated themselves from nature that we have decided that when we live with an animal they are our playthings, and that certain kinds of animals living in an urban setting must all be owned (such as cats, dogs, guinea pigs, miniature pot-belly pigs, or any kind of pig really), and that any cat, for example, that is living a free life that doesn't involve humans is a "stray", which must be captured and subdued, have it's genitals forcibly removed under sedation (!!) , and either given an "owner" so it can live in a house, or killed! I mean really, how shocking is this?!?! We buy and sell these beings without a second thought. We breed them, and then separate children from mothers at will, preventing almost every one of these poor creatures from ever spending more than 6-8 weeks with their mums. Those poor mums! I think this is so sad! It's actually really quite insane. We are all so conditioned to see this state of affairs as being quite normal, and even right, that chances are you are thinking that I am a bit loopy right now, and clearly "one of those people". But think about it. Our human systems of interaction are not set in stone. They were not handed down by some mystical deity. We made them up. And we can unmake them. Unfortunately for the non-humans we have opposable thumbs, more complicated brains and are often stronger (than the urban creatures anyway), so in this case might wins. But is this right?
I have a beautiful book that I bought from a lovely second hand bookstore in Warrandyte on one of my lovely random drives into the countryside that I used to enjoy once upon a time before I had my beloved daughter. It is called Cats of the Greek Islands, or some such thing, and is filled with the most beautiful pictures of these most fortunate of the world's feline creatures, living amongst the people of the Islands, never as pets, but as true citizens. They loll about in groups and clans. They wander. They have babies. They look after their babies, and stay by their side, until mother and child naturally feel the inclination to be more independent. They sleep curled amongst each other, and they play cheekily, as cats will do. They eat fish at the wharves when the fishing boats bring in their catch, and are loved by the residents, who also give them tasty tidbits from time to time. And most importantly they are free. They are truly free.
In my next life I'd like to be a well-fed and happy cat living on one of these islands. In the meantime, while I am a human in my current form, I take it upon myself to make the life of my beautiful feline companions, Dr Chops and The Mysterious Crunch, as comfortable and autonomous as possible. And I think I am doing a good job - they are two very happy cats. And very well fed.

Onions and Garlic

I had the best time with Indi today! She is such a spritely soul, so full of joy and humour and good cheer. I like her a lot. I mean, clearly I LOVE HER to absolute bits and pieces, a force of love so powerful it leaves me breathless... but on top of that, I really LIKE her. She's my little buddy.
So what's with the root vegetables I hear you ask? Well, just as I was gathering the aforementioned edibles from my pantry, about to work up a magical soupy treat in my new pressure cooker, I turned to Indi who was being held by my beloved in the kitchen - they often hang out with me while I cook which I love - and showed her the items one by one. "Onion" I said as I held up the onion, and "Garlic" I said as I held up a clove of garlic, and much to my surprise and sheer delight, she burst out laughing! Now there is no sound on this planet that pleases me more than the laughter of my cherubic daughter, and no sight more look-worthy than her face full of glee and joy as she chortles away, it's just the best. So Mat and I burst out laughing right along with her. And, as I tend to do when I spring upon some action which pleases my daughter, like a court jester wanting to please my queen, I repeated the above actions - "Onion", "Garlic" - and this time there was even more laughter, she positively cacked herself! If she could have slapped her thighs she would have. So yes, for the next TEN MINUTES, I kid you not, I repeated "Onion" [chortle chortle], "Garlic" [squeal chortle giggle], with Mat and I laughing right along with her and both our hearts just bursting with love and joy. Now the interesting thing was, the garlic was much funnier than the onion for some reason. I experimented by replacing the garlic with a carrot, which also got a fair few giggles, but then when I brought the garlic back, well, it was clear, the garlic was HILARIOUS.
I'm laughing just writing about it.
Kids are so cool.

My spiritual journey

I had a realisation today about my evolving spirituality. I realised that I have travelled through and beyond a number of traditions and spiritual spheres, which have each served me at the time and have led to the next, and that each successive shift has happened naturally and in its own time, without me consciously thinking about it. This process has been taking place over the last twelve years or so. I started with yoga and hinduism, and spent a lot of time studying yoga philosophy as well as actually practicing meditation and physical yoga practice, and then moved on to Buddhism and Vipassana meditation, again with lots of study of buddhist philosophy and taking part in ten day silent retreats, then went all New Age with tarot and reiki and manifestation and the like.
So then I wondered - where I am now? It's hard to say.
I don't meditate or do yoga in the classical sense at all. I rarely do reiki, except with my cat Dr Chops, who is a reiki master and loves to receive it also. I don't agree with a lot of Buddhist philosophy these days as it is based on the cessation of suffering as the road to enlightenment, which I find ties in with my problems with the New Age movement and it's focus on rainbows and light and its tendency to shy away from the dark. This is the case with yoga also, there is a lot of repression of the darker parts of ourselves, and an insistence on feeling good. I think the dark parts of ourselves and of the universe are important. The dark is an essential element in a balanced system in my opinion, one half of the yin yang. Although Buddhism acknowledges the dark, it seeks to eliminate it, whereas I believe that dark times and difficulty are actually an intrinsic element of an evolving consciousness, and that the seeds of hardship bear the sweetest fruit in the end. Not that I go about looking for trouble, don't get me wrong, I think life tends to hand you your fair share of difficult trials quite naturally (in a karmic sort of way mostly, but not always) and it's our job to look for the lessons and to grow and evolve as a result of living through the hard times. Also, I definitely believe in natural cycles, in our own personal winters and springs and summers and autumns, and that you need to sit through the cold winter where it looks like not much is happening before you can get to the spring when your spirit blooms with a million flowers and then bears fruit in the summer which you can then harvest in the autumn.
What I do on a spiritual level is kind of hard to describe, very hard to describe actually, and also quite personal. I have learned over the years to keep sacred areas a bit secret. I used to go shouting from the rooftops whenever I had a spiritual breakthrough, I was always so excited, but it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that I would always burst my precious bubbles of delight by making a big song and dance about things. These days my spiritual experiences barely get spoken about, they live in a private room in my heart, and it feels so much better that way.
But even if I wanted to go into detail about what I actually DO as a spiritual practice, I would be hard pressed to list anything, or describe an actual process. But my spirituality is a huge part of my life, and gives me untold joy and fulfillment. It is one of the best things in my life, alongside my relationship with my beautiful man and my amazing heartstoppingly gorgeous child. And my cats. And my sisters. Oh alright, my mum too. My spirituality enriches my life so much, it is where I grow, and get closer to the best me that I can be, the me I am working towards bringing into my daily life. I am so thankful that I have this cosmic space to loll about in.
That reminds me, gratitude is one of the biggest parts of my spirituality. Being grateful is one thing that I do do on a regular basis that I could comfortably call a solid element of my spiritual practice. I think it is an essential part of a happy and harmonious life, and paves the way for you to work in harmony with the universe. I'm not sure about the actual mechanism, but I do know that it works. Being grateful is a powerful force, and should be practiced regularly!
So I'm left with more questions than answers today - Where is my spirituality now? What does it involve? How do I speak about it? Do I speak about it?
There is a part of me that thinks some questions are better left unanswered, and some things better enjoyed than over-analysed.

Geraniums

I'm very into them at the moment. They have such a strong life force. After months of neglect over summer once Indi was born, the only plants in my front yard to look chirpy and well were three geraniums by the driveway. A year or so ago I stuck three cuttings haphazardly into the ground, and then forgot about them, and now I have three lovely happy plants all bushy and covered with flowers blazing away. Any plant that can withstand drought conditions over summer without watering gets my praise and recognition, and as a result I have been on a bit of a rampage of late, procuring cuttings from here and there to bung into my yard. I have never come across a plant that strikes so easily from cuttings. You literally just have to pick a branch off any existing bush, trim almost all the leaves off, except for the little young ones near the tip, and poke it into the soil about an inch deep, or more if you can be bothered, but that's it. They barely need a glance after that. And with a new baby this suits me fine! They occasionally need for you to pick off the dying leaves and the dead flower heads, a bit of a prune now and again (or not). I just feel they are very good natured beings, and have decided to build up a bit of a collection. So there you have it, I like geraniums, they are good.