Gardener

I have been gardening.

I have been tidying up the front garden. This has been a bit neglected lately, not least because we still can’t get to it, because the front door is stuck shut.

This is so damp that it has swollen to colossal size, and is filling the hole just about as thoroughly as hole filling can be done. Think: cork in champagne bottle, only blackened and greasy, and smelling of mould instead of excitement and celebration and the promise of strawberries.

You can’t even open it by hurling yourself against it from the outside, because the Yale lock is stuck shut by the force of the enormous damp door. Mark says that he could take the door off and plane some bits off it, but I don’t think he ought to, because this will mean that when the spring comes, and the door dries slowly back to its normal size, we will have draughts around it.

In consequence of this we have not been out into the front garden for ages, and the non-speaking postman is better acquainted with it than we are. We have to take parcels through the bedroom window now, but on the plus side I suppose it would deter a burglar.

I went out through the back door and round. It was so cold that I  had to put on two coats and my gloves. I did not think about my gloves to start off with, and had to go back inside to warm my fingers under the tap in the kitchen sink before I put them on, because the soil was absolutely icy, and after a minute or two of scraping around in it, my fingers were numb.

Actually they were not numb. It would have been a lot better if they had been. Instead they were so cold that they hurt terribly. Ranulf Fiennes once sawed off the ends of his own fingers after they got frost bitten, and I did not want to have to do this. Also once when he took his sock off a couple of his toes went with it, so I was glad of my sheepskin boots.

Ranulf Fiennes is one of Mark’s heroes, but secretly I think he might be a bit mental.

It all made me think that it is still too early to start thinking about planting seeds, and also that I am very glad that I am a person and not a worm.

Of course I know that worms do not mind the cold really. I always try to remember that our touch burns them when we pick them up. All the same it does not seem to be a very happy sort of life, wriggling about in the frozen darkness until eventually spring comes and you get eaten by a blackbird.

There were lots of worms. Not as many as in the compost heap, which is positively cherry-coloured just under the surface, but a respectable number, which made me feel pleased about the effectiveness of my soil management strategy. This mostly involves leaving it alone, and occasionally scraping it off the bottom of my boots.

I cut down all of the dead stalks of last year’s things. This was satisfying, because there was lots of new growth underneath. The peony shoots are absolutely bright red, and there are more of them than there were last year. I had thought that perhaps the hostas had all died, but they haven’t, and there were little shoots everywhere. I put lots of slug pellets round these, because hostas are the slugs’ absolute favourite, like chocolate ginger biscuits for people.

I discovered an invasion of creeping buttercup, which I savaged ruthlessly, and an awful lot of litter, blown in from the road during the recent Spanish storm. I was cross about this, although pleased to consider that every piece that I picked up and put in the dustbin would not one day be accidentally eaten by a turtle.

I saw somebody throwing litter out of a car in a car park the other day, and marched across and gave it back to them, which made me feel very pleased with myself. I felt as though I was a real Eco Warrior, although I suppose the girl in question just thought I was an interfering old biddy.

I had made a huge pile of sticks and weeds, and was just about to go and find the wheelbarrow, when Mark turned up with it. He had filled it with muck from the farm. Really we have been bringing this home to fill the bed in the conservatory, but he thought we could probably spare some for the garden, and kindly trundled it around to the front for me.

This was thoughtful of him, because he was busy putting flashing on the conservatory. He went to the scrap yard the other day and swapped some of his tiresome scrap metal for some lead flashing, so that he could stop the leaks around the conservatory edges, and also so that I would stop shouting at him about having a shed full of rubbish.

He helped me spread it over the flower beds, the muck, not the scrap metal, obviously. In the end they looked warm and hopeful, as if they had a thick brown blanket spread over them. Then I put slug pellets around the hostas and filled the wheelbarrow with sticks and weeds, and trundled it along the road and round to the back of the house again.

We are hopeful for the spring.

Have a picture of the  garden.