A little spot of shock and horror

Yep. Bad.

Really bad.

And not just the shadow of the gardener ruining this photo.

I was trying to look at the pictures I shot of this work in progress last week. There was shuddering. And half turning away in disgust.

But this is a real garden. And this vegetable garden was a real mess.

I had spent so many months hoping that all my problems would be solved with the construction of my raised beds. But it is utter fantasy to get six beds built on the top half of the potager along with this snail pace construction of the main ones in the lower part.

That is definitely going to be a next year job. Well, it’s on my To Do list for the long term plans. I want to have lower height beds at the top part to take account of the slope, and to grow tomatoes that I will actually be able to reach.

You can see all the lovely images that went through my mind as I was dealing with the car crash of a mess. I had stockpiled all the pots over winter and somehow didn’t think through moving them twice.

Thrice. They went from the beds to a temporary shelter under a tonne of nice compost at the building site end of the garden. And then I decided to move half and stack them at the top of the potager.

That gave me space to work elsewhere. But it didn’t solve the problem of what to do with them. Thirty five dahlias! In buckets. A sea of sown from seed marvellous Liquorice Blue agastache…. Bulbs galore. A forest of crocosmia.

So I took a very deep breath and just started.

You may recall the raspberries went first. That liberated space. It took a whole week.

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And then I decided to make a few dedicated flower beds for the pots of dahlias and gladiolus. But still leaving room for the aubergines and tomatoes I hope one day to grow.

You don’t want to know the minor panic I had realising that my usual ‘dealer’ in grafted tomatoes and aubergines is not going to be accessible this year. Well, not for the foreseeable future.

So I had to sow some tomato seeds and actually rustle up the aubergine seeds from the depths of the seed cupboard and hope they haven’t lost their virility.

There are in here somewhere, hopefully germinating, even if I am a month behind.

And then I had to sort out the old watering system hoses that were all over this place. I won’t be doing drip watering for the raised beds. But I will need to keep them in site for the top.

The poor stone masons must have wondered what the mad woman was doing wrestling tendrils of hoses for half the morning trying to sort the mess out. They were threaded through the central path and extracting them Wasn’t Fun.

I’m not there yet. But hopefully these ghastly shots will have kept you entertained. In These Trying Times we could all do with a laugh.

Or a perfect mad parrot tulip on one’s desk as one types.