Mutant Garden

In the spirit of Actually Getting Things Done I have blitzed through two whole tasks in the garden by failing to do them properly first time around. Or compromising if you're one of those relentlessly optimistic characters. I’ve decided to go on holiday at some point and can’t face coming back to the land of giant tree pile and rubbish. So I’m making it look tidier by moving things from place to another basically. And hopefully reducing giant tree pile to ashes. Literally. I may have been assisted in my fervour by a plate of carbs in the form of crab mac and cheese* and plan to continue this method until my garden looks like a garden again and not a refuge for hoarders. Other victims of my faux enthusiasm aside from my pancreas were my good sweatpants (so called because they were soft) and my black hoodie. I may have also worried about blood poisoning from rusty wires (thankfully my tetanus is up to date), spiders crawling on me and the noise my tarp wall was making annoying t...

When it comes to gardening, I seem to have perfected the art of time travel. I go outside and into the Tardis. 2 hours later I come back out having not accomplished very much. If my gardening life was a movie it would be Dr Who Does Groundhog Day. I go out, I battle roots, hit myself in the face with various types of shrubbery, break garden tools and generally wreak havoc instead of progress. Take yesterday for example. Or the day before, or last Tuesday, really doesn’t matter. The only difference was the addition of music to yesterday’s repertoire. Turns out headphones and spades don’t mix. And the lack of progress may also correlate to the number of dancing breaks… The intention was to clear the area of ground for the storage and compost heap. What actually happened was: Irrational dislike to ivy plant and a half an hour battle to remove said ivy plant. Metallica didn’t help but it was finally vanquished with the assistance of Powerwolf. Said hello to the beetle I saw ...

I finally googled what wattles are. And this led me to a video where a clay hut was being made. Not going to lie I fell a little bit in lust with the competence of the dude. And also learned how to climb a tree without handholds. Winning. Today has been a bit of a boom and bust day garden wise. I made this lovely pile of wood... The temptation to throw a bunch of compost over this wood pile and make a giant hugelkultur was almost unbearable. However, I don’t think the neighbours would like it and harvesting would be a problem seeing as the pile is taller than me. But I can just picture it… The point of the wood pile was to clear room for the compost heap. I took an irrational dislike to an ivy plant that had become a tree so wrestling with that took me up to the time I had to leave. On the bright side, I realised that the land at the side is actually wider than I thought. I will have plenty of space for the pallet heap plan. I also found a random fence post buried in the trees ...

Much of the ‘gardening’ thus far has been discovering exactly how many roots have been lurking under the soil and forming a more unnecessarily complicated network than Facebook. I say roots, what I really mean is fully developed underground tree branches than could be used for firewood, fencing or the construction of a small shed. My garden is the bottom corner of a giant, higgledy piggledy tumble of backfill, lawn and random leftovers from previous occupants including two random fence posts, a tyre and several rubbish bags. There is a hedge running along the back which leads to the netherworld. Or yet another abandoned council property that is used for nefarious purposes and a random Asian volleyball club. At one point, there was a gap in this hedge which led to local vermin schoolchildren using it as a shortcut. Thanks to previous experiments, I have now learned that the reason why my garden looks like it is running away from itself i.e. sloping in all directions at once is thanks t...

42. The meaning of life? Or the number of garden implements that I will collect from the shed in order to complete any one task? You decide. I don’t garden like other people. Or do anything like other people for that matter. I imagine most folk garden in a neat and orderly fashion, following the order of business at the allotment, mowing the lawn before it gets too hot, replacing the flowers every year… I don’t have a lawn, I have a dandelion farm (mesclun is actually a component of salad). I planted flowers a few years ago and promptly forgot about them. Which was a very pleasant surprise when the tulips still reappeared after their first year. My shed has a hole in the roof and may or may not be home to a wasp colony. My patio has a giant hole in it, seven pallets and more ‘I’ll do something with that one day’ than my neighbours would like. Especially since I have never actually got around to putting up a fence. Which does not stop me from complaining when the random neighbours tha...

I have nobody to blame but myself. Some time in the last two or three years I have become The Neighbour From Hell, the Steptoe of the Street, the Chief Procrastinator of Hoarderville. Of course there are reasons, there always are. Too much work, too noisy a brain… The usual. It was always somewhat unkempt around the edges but a perfectly functional garden nonetheless. If I’m honest I never actually ate any of those vegetables, this was more gardening for experimental purposes. Yes I know that is a terrible waste. See picture number one for evidence as to the type of person I currently am. I’m fairly sure I look a bit like it in person as well. My garden and I have a complicated relationship. I know what I want it to do, in theory, and in reality I do nothing. I have enough land to produce food for myself and enough time (again, in theory less than reality) to turn my garden into something functional and pretty. Which is what I want. I think. My brain sometimes can’t hear itself...