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