28 September 2007

What lies beneath

Last weekend while digging over one of the beds in the middle of the garden I hit a snag. A very hard snag. I was trying to dig a trench at a spade’s depth and reached concrete. When we moved in there was a massive pile of rubbish at that end of the garden that we cleared out. It was full of roof tiles, copper piping, a satellite dish and a car dashboard. Finding remnants of this rubbish is no surprise at all. ‘No problem,’ I thought, ‘that part of the garden is full of broken bits of brick, I’ll dig around it and pull it out’.

That’s when the difficulties really started.

I could get my spade into soft earth on two sides of it, but the other two sides were proving more difficult. I uncovered more and more and more of it and eventually discovered that it runs the entire length of all the beds in the middle. There is a garden path right in the middle of my vegetable beds!

It seems to be in the nature of digging gardens that strange treasures will be found, but what is most surprising is that it’s not as though I was digging over ground that has lain undisturbed in all the time we have lived here. About three years ago my brother dug over the entire garden before we sowed a lawn. And don’t forget that Owen and my Dad went over it all again recently with a rotovator too. How come we didn’t find this path then?

For a while I was worried - there’s no way we can get rid of this path without hiring a suitable machine to break it up, then removing the beds and the slate on the paths between the beds before taking on what would be a back-breaking amount of work. Call me a quitter, but I couldn’t face it and I decided that I’m just going to have to work around it. The path is very narrow (probably less than a quarter the width of the beds) and is a spade’s depth down, so I don’t think it will affect roots or drainage too much. With the beds being filled another spade’s depth as well, I should be OK. If the worst comes to the very worst and nothing much grows there next year, we can always build the beds up to double height and make them even deeper. Though I’d like not to have to do this if at all possible.

Bring back the car dashboard. At least that had novelty value.

Filed under: Potager project — Clare @ 3:52 pm