Gardening Gripes

There are chores that we have to do, there’s no escaping them. Washing up, hoovering, laundry and putting out the rubbish, they all need to be done. There are some chores, that don’t need to be done quite so often, but are actually quite enjoyable, so you don’t mind doing them and quite happy finish them off with a smile on your face. Then there is gardening. The worst chore known to man.

My main gripe about gardening, apart from the million little things that fly around annoying me, in some cases putting the fear of God into me, is that none of the machinery is actually very good. Ok, so I’m not going to go out and invest in a hi-tech combine harvester type mower as advertised by Forrest Gump, but if I spend £100 on a mower, I’d expect it to at least mow. Rather than me having to go around the garden six times to get every stray blade of grass and random weed that refuses to meets its inevitable demise. But by far the biggest and singularly most annoying thing, not just in gardening, but possible the entire universe is the strimmer. Because mowers cannot quite mow right to the edges, you need an extra piece of equipment to get everything looking nice and trim. So what invariably happens is that you plug the strimmer in, walk over to the edge of the lawn, press the start button, wave the strimmer over the stray grass before cutting. At this point, any random stone gets in the way, flies up and into your shins, causing gashes of varying severity. But then, just as soon as you’ve screamed “ouch”, the strimmer starts wailing a horrible high pitched screeching as if it is itself in pain and not you. This signals that the wire underneath the strimmer has snapped off. So you go, to the plug, remove it for safety reasons, go back to the strimmer which is at the end of the garden and reinsert the cord so it can now slice more stray grass and slam yet more stones into your shins. The whole sorry process is then repeated, depending upon the size of your garden, once every meter or so, which in our case is extremely fortunate as our garden isn’t very large!

Which is why, when it comes to our own garden I tackle any routine chores with the most displeasure. We have, what is supposed to be a lawn in our back garden, which with many thanks to Colin, my father in law - looks quite nice framed with the fences panels that he kindly painted and a couple of little rock formations to the right hand side and to the rear, until on closer inspection you realise that the ground is bumpy and that the grass is losing it’s battle for supremacy with the well loved and respected weed.

Birdseye view of the garden

Before this summer, that’s all we had, along with a washing line that ran through the middle of the garden, that didn’t quite rise up and down like it was supposed to, until Stephanie decided that Oliver needed to have an eight foot trampoline, which was ‘bargain of the century’ from a one off sale at Asda. “Cool!” said Oliver, “Boo” said Daddy. As the logistical nightmare became a reality upon completion of the assembled trampoline. One small garden, one large trampoline. Didn’t and hasn’t really worked.

So I had to take the line down, and replace it with a rather more functional rotary line (at yet more expense) and attempt to make the trampoline as level as I possibly could, which has subsequently proved to be a little more difficult. I had been at a happy medium all the time that the trampoline was in use and the garden didn’t have me in it. But everytime I’ve mowed the lawn since, I’ve had to try and fight my way around and under the trampoline. Something had to give. And it did, quite spectacularly.

I realised that the get the trampoline level, I had to dig a bit of a hole. But I needed some place to put any unneeded soil. I could dispose of it, but the thought of filling up another endless number of soil bags, as we did with our front garden a couple of years ago was too much to bare. So I decided there and then, that we would be having a raised bed which we would attempt to grow vegetables in! I am sure that you are as suprised at the juxtaposition as I am!

Which is why, over the past two weekends I have been digging, relocating pathways, constructing temporary retaining boxes and blistering my office sensitive hands into smithereens! I may hate gardening above all else and all the things that annoy me, but I’m actually looking quite forward to seeing how this pans out, if we can actually grow a decent crop in our own little patch. But the important thing here, is that we get the chance to involve Oliver and the new baby when he/she is old enough. Show them were food comes from and how long it takes to grow, which is probably worth the gashed shins and constant gardening gripes. Isn’t it?

Slave labour!