More garden excavation
Well that’s a relief: I thought I had buried my pair of secateurs under a pile of dirt. But it turns out they were here in the kitchen all the time.
I had visions of even more careful sifting of the soil than I’m doing already. Sifting for ivy roots is not the same as trying to find a needle in a haystack. Or in this instance a pair of favourite garden tools in a mountain of soil.
I seem to recall I promised you pictures of the finished product. Twelve metres of mountain cleared of weeds and plants and soil and sitting ready and waiting for some walls.
No.
I’m slow. I even, horrors, had a day off yesterday. I picked endless quantities of flowers first thing and it seemed to set the tone of the day. Wafting about picking flowers and fruit; helping Elodie with the house, making up bouquets. Taking some to neighbours. I was almost a lady of leisure.
Add in a boiling hot day, the lure of the Tour de France on the tv, a mountain of ironing, wooden work surfaces to oil and the plans to go outdoors and dig were set aside.
But after the market this morning (8am at the cafe with my mates) I was at the coal face.
It was gloriously shaded and I had plenty of time to ponder my mistake.
If you had to describe how I start a new huge garden project it would definitely be quick, impulsive, keen and enthusiastic. Not spending a lot of time on the pondering and the planning until the site is cleared.
Because if I planned this properly I would realize that I needed to weed the flat bed at the base of the garden first.
It’s choked with not only ivy (two types) but brambles, lilac stumps and suckers, the cut down deutzia, a miscanthus grass (growing lustily), sedums, asters, lavender Hidcote and a whole bed of alyssum. That pretty spring flowering plant with white flowers.
And rocks, broken glass, snails and odd bits of broken concrete. And about fifty large stones left over from the steps building work.
It looked like tedious and picky work. And I went for the grand gesture of starting at the top of the slope instead.
And as a result, all my work now involves trying to weed around about three cubic metres of soil which travels down the slope with me as I clear. I can’t risk dumping it all on the flat lilac bed. So it is stacking up near the bottom and I am trying to get the energy to shovel it into buckets and put it aside.
I don’t have that many buckets.
Or that much energy. I’m already girding my loins to get back out there to bag up all the weeded bits which I have flung about. And now that I have shamed myself publicly; I will shift some of that soil.
Best of the day’s weeding – Artur kept me company most of the day.
He loves the newly turned cool dirt. And he loves a lap. So we had to have affection in shifts – I gave him about five minutes of head scratching before I tried to shift him with my trowel work. He had a go at clinging on despite my wriggling, and eventually would move off somewhere nearby.
I even had visitors; my neighbour and a friend came up on horseback for a chat. And curse not having my camera out when Ulysse leaned over the weedy flat part of the bank to touch noses with Artur who was on my lap at the time.
It would have been an adorable scene had the huge horse (skittish at the best of times) not backed into the parked wheelbarrow behind him and knocked over the buckets of small rocks I had carefully stacked there. With a quick wave while the horse tried to bolt in fright, they were off home. Most exciting.
More exciting than shifting soil.
Oh, what was exciting was I found a rock wall. You may recall I had visions of unearthing a beautiful stone one when I started this mad venture. And here it is.
It’s about one foot high and located at the very base of the slope. Scraping off the decades of soil, roots and ivy tendrils will not be fun. But I’m determined to see if it goes all the way along the base. That way I have something to build on. Literally.
