Gardening in pyjamas

38 degrees yesterday. 31 today. 41 tomorrow.
So it's out early with the buckets of leftover shower and kitchen water, plus a little squirt from the tank. (I fear I may have been a bit profligate with the tank water early in the summer.)
The seedlings are suffering: lettuce, chard, beetroot. The citrus are sulking. The tomatoes and eggplants are growing five inches a day.
Like everyone else in Melbourne and half of Victoria, I spend an inordinate amount of time in the early mornings lugging buckets about and dribbling water rather meanly onto priority plants.
For me, food is the priority, followed by relatively new plantings that might need a very occasional helping hand, and a couple of young grevilleas that got inundated by caterpillars and all their new growth chewed. Everything else just has to cope - or not. They mostly cope, because I just don't buy or plant anything that has high water needs.
It's far too hot for gardening the rest of the day, so the early morning is also the best time for trimming, spraying, and of course harvesting. Evening is the time for deadheading, vaguely staring at things and pottering.
This morning I brought in the last of the tree onions. I just love how they are known as Egyptian Walking Onions. I have visions of little onions walking like Egyptians all over the veggie patch, singing happily to themselves.
But I'm not letting them walk - that is, normally they would bend over so the tiny bulblets on the ends of the stems touch the ground and plant themselves. I've put the bulblets in a string bag for planting later in the year as I have to rotate them to another part of the patch.
The early morning watering and pottering means I am always to be seen gardening in pyjamas and things (plus hat and sunnies on weekends). It's a good look. Luckily nobody can see me. At least, only the odd local walking their dog along the river. The other week one of them surprised me - he'd lost his dog and shouted out to me to ask if I'd seen it. I was in the chook house in my dressing gown at the time.
At present I'm reading Monty Don's gorgeous Ivington Diaries, his journal of several years of building and maintaining a beautiful and productive English country garden. His entries for January and February involve frost, rain, floods and snow and not being able to get out into the garden in the daytime. Mine involve bushfire fuel raking and the scent of lavender and hot tomatoes. Last entry I read, he was pricking out rocket seedlings in the potting shed early one morning. I just chuck a handful of rocket seeds on the ground and off they go.
It's a world away from here - on every possible level.
But on the other hand, we're both gardening in our pyjamas.