Column | Between the worms

The construction of an allotment garden has never been a dream of mine. In fact, I don’t have to think about spending my free time between the worms and the snails. That does not alter the fact that I am fascinated by the people who prefer nothing. What inspires them?

I finally get an answer to that question thanks to the book Worms and earth, A bundling columns of the now 75-year-old Yvonne Kroonenberg. I mainly knew her from bestselling column bundles with challenging titles such as All men only want one thing and Everything gets used except a guy. They still came from the last century, but columnists also get a year older and gradually shift their field of activity, just like criminals that of the exciting burglary on the more complicated phishing change.

For example, Kroonenberg wrote a lot about informal care, nursing homes and other consequences of old age in its columns Plusmonthly magazine for people over 50. Less noticed her book The tits bus From 2022, in which she writes penetratingly about the breast cancer that she received at the age of 68.

At the end of that book, she writes after her provisional healing: « Yet I don’t belong to the healthy people. You will never be who you were again. That is also advantages. I am never in a hurry again. I am not impatient. I have changed. I love gardening. And I walk with friends. I think everything is important. Everything that belongs to normal life. »

There you already have it: gardening! With the same open -mindedness with which she used to write about sex and love, she now registers Worms and earth About the art of hoeing and weeding, the choice of plants and about the different, sometimes clashing views on the maintenance of such a garden.

She had no experience with it when she started it with her husband Joep. « I didn’t know anything about gardening. I knew the word hoeing but I never made it (…) but we made a decision: we were now people with an allotment garden. We became members of the association and got the keys to the entrance gate of the complex and the increased front door. »

The interest in such a garden is great, you only get in through a waiting list. Newcomers are warned: such a allotment garden is not a campsite, you come to work the land and to set up an attractive garden. « People who come chilling alone is looked down. »

It is hard work, notes Kroonenberg. « I prefer to work on my hands and knees. In that position I can more or less relax my shoulders and legs, so that I can use all the power I have in my hands for the fight. »

Yet she finds it mostly « grateful work. » « You take care of a plant and it rewards you with flowers. Or with a nice fruit. And you organize nature. People are only too happy to do that. Without hoeing and a pruner, it will be a gang in the world. »

She is right, but I look more like Yvonne Kroonenberg’s sister who leaves the maintenance of her beautiful back garden in the city to a neighbor. Yvonne asked her if she never wanted to do anything about her garden herself. « No, » replied that sister, « I don’t like dirty hands and my neighbor thinks it’s an only thing. »

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