Mutant Garden

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...