Have you ever slept up a tree?

Beau Miles has. His approach was a little gnarlier than mine, hoisting a park bench into a roadside Strzelecki gum and refusing to come down – even for an interview.

My setup was less park bench, more Park Hyatt: camping mat, sleeping bag, miniature pillow and mozzie net on a wooden platform in the old pear tree at Melliodora. 

Luxury. For a time.

I’ve been wanting to spend a night in Grandmother Pear for yonks, and as the weather warmed and excuses waned I found myself hauling supplies up the treehouse ladder last Friday night.

It was a balmy end to a blistering day. Pink sky, half moon, chatty leaves. 

I lay under a tip shop mozzie net high off the ground, throwing my gaze into the canopy, feeling the breeze in my leg hair. A semi-wild princess on a plinth. 

Long billed corellas screeched and wheeled. Crickets whisked. A magpie played the flute. 

This is gonna be so peaceful and restful, I thought, curling my body beneath a belly-like protrusion in Grandmother Pear’s upper trunk. Maybe I’ll sleep out here every night.

But as the day’s eyelids drooped, the mozzies awoke to my existence. They threw themselves at the net, buzzing with bloodlust, desperate to get in. For an hour or two I was smug and they sucked eggs.

I’ll never know if it was cracks in the floorboards, a tear in the net, or rapid mosquito evolution, but somehow they ended up on the inside, trapped in an all-you-can-eat buffet of legs and arms and cheeks. 

There was nothing I could do but pull the sleeping bag around my ears and maintain a metronomic swat, haunted by the sound of tiny itchy wings beating 1000 times per second.

And as if non-consensual phlebotomy wasn’t enough, the neighbours got home around midnight and started blasting non-consensual Nickelback. 

I must’ve dozed off eventually because I awoke to ants the size of cats raining down on my head from the dreamscape. No moon, no lights, so quiet you could hear a possum blink. 

It was 3:02 in the morning, and after another hour of tossing and turning under repeated mozzie attack, I decided to call it quits on the experiment. 

Climbing down the ladder and slinking home was no walk in the park. 

Every step on the summer-dry earth cracked the dead night open; snap, thwack, crunch. I’d never felt so conspicuous. 

Spiderwebs became straight jackets as I stumbled between trees and down pathways, at last arriving home to The Dog who’d been worried sick, telling me about it with growls and yelps and barks until daybreak.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But at least I gained a deeper connection with and empathy for Grandmother Pear, who has to listen to washed up soft rock every weekend and can’t run away.

There are six steep kilometres between me and my favourite cake.

Five minutes in the car. 

20 minutes on a bicycle. 

Up and up the winding road to town.

And of course I take the bike, because treats taste better with a side of post-cardio bravado.

This morning I saddled up and set out on my sugar quest, grinding up the first few hills with a haggard expression that probably put the tourists off their brunch.

My bike is a city slicker – big on shine, light on gears. So most hills are a struggle, but none are quite as tough as the Can Crusher. 

It’s a short sharp climb on a footpath full of potholes, the occasional can of Carlton Draught lying crumpled in the dirt. 

Even in the lowest gear I can only just keep the wheels turning. But I never give in, oh no, I’d rather split my shorts or burst a valve in my head than let this hill beat me. 

But today, right at the steepest point, southerly howling and lungs full of grenades…

…I jumped off. And I pushed.

You might think it’s no biggie, but let me tell you about my personal bike riding policy. 

It goes like this:

NO PUSHING EVER.

That’s the policy.

I don’t like admitting defeat  – in fitness, in life. 

In my secret dreams I just keep getting stronger, reaching further, learning more, being more, chucking snow chains on my tires and pedalling up the face of Mount Everest. 

It’s all a bit grandiose, but there you have it.

Yet as I trudged up the slope, pushing my bicycle like a sad pilgrim, cold wind slicing through sweaty pits, strands of hair in my gob…

…I realised the folly of my ways. 

One day I’ll have to accept the limits of my body. 

One day we’ll have to accept the limits of our planet. 

And instead of pretending we’re invincible, on a quest to conquer every hill and capture every star, grinding up and up and up an unrelenting path of progress (even if it kills us) we can gracefully dismount, knowing when enough is enough. 

And anyway, still got the cake.

Personal bios. Aren’t they strange?

I had to write one yesterday for a publication, summing myself up in 50 words or less.

I laid down the usual, ‘I’m a writer, grower, naturopath...’, building a brand from my work and studies, adding a few accolades as scaffolding.

But then I stopped, slapped delete and sat there wondering: am I really these firm and fixed things?

Can I seriously claim to be anything other than...

...a wiggly line? A wave? A scribble? Pure drivel? A confusion? A profusion? A whiff? A tune? A yoga mat, unrolled? Five senses, all told? A blob? A knob? Smashed feelings on sourdough with sriracha?

It’s a process, this thing I call me.

Nothing could be more uncertain.

So I settled for saying, ‘Catie Payne writes, draws, grows and walks...’, with a nod to the unfurling.

Because I didn’t think the yoga mat reference would fly.

The room is dim. My upper lip is damp. The dog is dead.

Welcome back, summer.

We’ve closed the blinds and battened the hatches, making our house feel like the hole of a reclusive marsupial.

But while we chill in our hovel, the plants aren’t so lucky. They’re out there enduring the hottest day in forever, struggling to keep themselves cool through transpiration and avoid the ‘thermal death threshold’.

(Somebody start a botanical metal band called Thermal Death Threshold.) 

That’s why on Saturday night, before temperatures were tipped to soar, we trundled off to our backyard farm in Fawkner to rig up shade cloths and old sheets like some kind of shanty town, providing small slivers of safety for our adolescent crops. 

George at the farm with makeshift shade cover.

And as we did, I thought about all the shitty meteorological events that farmers have to endure.

Hail that blasts holes in apples.

Wind that flips equipment and rip trees from the ground.

Stinking hot days that suck the living daylight out of crops on the cusp of harvest.

Droughts that last decades.

These uncontrollable forces of nature make feeding people at scale rather perilous.

Then of course, there’s plain bad luck.

Recently, the farm where we buy our eggs and supplementary veggies endured a total clusterfuck.

A tiny spark set their barn alight, cremating hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of equipment, stored produce and confidence. 

They were at the farmer’s market the very next day, looking beaten, with a skimpy assortment of greens and eggs. The survivors.

I saw one of the market staff walk up to Paul the farmer, hold him by the shoulders and look into his face like, mate, I don’t know what to say.

Most shoppers, unaware of what had happened, gave the stall a wide berth.

It looked mean and meagre, lacking the leafy abundance that draws a crowd.

Insult to injury. 

In our current food system, farmers carry all the stress and risk of growing food.

They cop the fall on climate change. They withstand the wrath of the market. They go the extra mile to be organic, sustainable and regenerative even when it doesn’t make economic sense. 

They get burned by bad luck.

We go somewhere else. 

That’s why models like CSA (community supported agriculture) or co-ops (owned and controlled by members) make a whole lotta sense. 

Rather than one person/family/farmer taking it on alone, risk is distributed evenly among a group of invested individuals.

You pay upfront or commit to buying whatever the farmer can produce that week on an ongoing basis. Maybe you won’t get zucchini flowers every time, but when growing’s good you’ll receive more tomatoes than you know what to do with. Meanwhile, the farmer gains a secure income and peace of mind. 

Sharing the ebbs, flows and explosions of produce is an act of camaraderie and something everyone with the means to do so should consider.

As a bonus, many CSA schemes give members a say in what crops are planted; hold working bees and open days; and share ‘behind the scenes’ intel that’s better than any blog post or book.

Mmmm. Skin in the game.

(And yeah, I hear you. Joining a CSA can be financially prohibitive, which is why we need to reimagine our food system so that even the lowest-cost produce is good for farmers, eaters and planet. Ethics shouldn’t have a price tag. Healthy food is a human right. Don’t ask me how to go about making this happen. My job is staring wistfully at the sky.)

So, I’d love to hear from you: Are you all over CSAs, or never-bloody-heard-of-them? 

Extra question: Have you built a relationship with a farmer/s where you live? Tell me about that. 

Supermega overachiever question: What are your thoughts on cultivating a fairer food system?

A few weeks ago I was pottering in the backyard -- admiring this, sniffing that, dancing around the greyhound droppings -- when I noticed my artichoke looking rather limp. 

Sidling up close, I saw hundreds of lime green aphids covering the plant from trunk to head, like an angry rash all raised and scaly.

Bugger, I thought. Sap suckers.

My eyes adjusted to their camouflage and stacks more materialised around the garden. Aphids everywhere.

The internet told me I should spritz affected plants with neem oil or high pressure hose the little blighters into next week.

Grandma recommended poisoning the ants that farm the aphids then to ‘stop messing about with vegetables and get a job’.

Monty Don said to do nothing.

Being a pretty lazy gardener, Monty's approach sounded good to me -- so I went inside, made myself a miso, and let nature take its course.

And lo! Behold! Just when I started to think The Don had done me in and all our plants would die, the cavalry arrived.

I spotted a ladybird on a daisy.

Then two.

Then two locked in a multi-day coital piggyback that was equally awkward and impressive.

Then a tangerine cluster of eggs appeared on the underside of a rudbeckia leaf, and not long after there were mini alligators marching up and down stems making a meal of the problem. 

(Have you ever seen ladybird larvae? Reptilian. Remarkable. Really worth Googling. Each one can dispatch hundreds of aphids before it turns into an adult ladybird, so they’re the kind of monsters you want on your team.) 

The whole ladybird life cycle played out in our veggie patch; the same veggie patch bereft of beneficial insects only days before.

The eggs turned to larvae, the larvae became pupae, and two weeks later adult ladybirds emerged looking fly and maintaining backyard balance.

All fuelled by aphids.

All part of an awe-inspiring and self-regulating system one trillion times bigger and smarter than me.

Imagine if I’d sprayed and squashed and shucked the aphids -- fave ladybird food -- in a bid to control and correct the situation?

It made me contemplate how often we forge ahead with an intervention believing we know best, when our wisdom is so very feeble and the ramifications so very great. (See: 'civilising' natives, introducing cane toads, putting RoundUp on everything.)

Yep, there are times to act: when Cousin Clay is telling that joke about blondes, when centuries-old trees are being felled for a highway, when you just put a shovel through your shoe...

... but there plenty of occasions where waiting and watching is a totally valid course of action. When Doing Nothing results in something good. Where trust and patience trump traps and poison. 

It's hard to Do Less in a world beguiled by Just Do It. But if the ladybirds have taught me anything, it's that we're not the only beings on this planet with a will and a way. It's not always up to us. We're not all that. How bloody comforting.

So my pledge this year is to do heaps less and see what happens.

If you need me, I'll be ogling insects in flagrante delicto.

What's your approach to 2021?