18 September 2007

Like a pig in…

The shed is almost complete (won’t be finished now until the weekend, and even then it’ll only be if the weather’s OK) and time is pushing on. I still have to finish preparing the beds before we can give them a proper filling. I’m working my way through the largest beds to start with, forking them over before digging out a trench at a spade’s depth. The trench then gets a light sprinkling of chicken manure pellets, is filled with shredded paper which gets a good old watering and then the dug out soil goes back on top and the process is repeated on the other side of the bed. The plan is to use well-rotted organic compost as a mulch and to raise the beds higher for planting.

After a strenuous day at work today and a more strenuous drive home dodging the traffic on the motorways, I just knew that the best thing I could do to clear my mind and energise my body was to do yet more digging. I didn’t do much. This was partly to do with time - it wasn’t long before the light started to go. Additionally, my progress was hampered by the discovery of a strange rusty metal sticky-up object that had me digging more than the depth of two spades before I could remove it. I was beginning to get concerned that I might unearth a grave if I kept going (the previous owner of our house was a very mysterious person with psychotic taste in interior decor who did a runner and left us to deal with the bailiffs who were chasing him for loads of debts so I think he was probably capable of anything - or perhaps that’s a little unfair of me). Still, I felt pretty smug when I did finally wrench the peculiar thing out of the ground (definitely metal, not bone - I’ve seen CSI and I can tell the difference) and could carry on with the ordinary digging. It was brilliant to forget about work and have some garden fun, even on a school night!

Being able to dip into gardening for a few minutes at a time is going to be the very best thing about having the patch just outside the back door. That and not finding any dead bodies.

Filed under: Hard labour, Potager project — Clare @ 6:40 pm