Inspiration and Perspiration

This May I have mostly been making ... a mess.

I am determined to get this back garden productive and at least two thirds of it laid out, and the patio tidied, by midsummer.

The weather has been amazing since mid-April, in that there has hardly been any rain. We usually have a dryish couple of weeks in April and May, and it starts turning rainy and changeable from midsummer. But the weather has stayed beautiful, day after day, as if to spite all of us locked down due to the SARS-Cov-2 Coronavirus pandemic, not allowed to go to beaches. We are supposed to stay local - no more than 5 miles from home, and even if I parlayed that into 'as the crow flies' instead of road distance, the car parks and toilets are shut. If you can't walk there, you can't go there. I have been out in the garden every day, if only to do a small job, or just watering. I hit a bit of a wall mid-month, where I had to have a couple of rest days, as my muscles and joints were so painful. Little by little, I have started to be able to work longer or harder, resting as soon as I need to, resuming when I feel up to it.

The brambles spread atrociously last year, when between painful joints and lots of rain, I neglected the garden. It has been cathartic to hack them back and dig them out, even though I couldn't burn them as I only like to light the incinerator when it is at least drizzly, so that no neighbours have washing out. I have been tackling the garden on all fronts: patio, herb, mint arc, both herbaceous areas; as usual, all of my balls in the air, playing the moving squares game by tackling areas of weeds and brambles, trying to create space to move plants and plant contents of pots. The big prize is to clear the areas for the veg beds, which have become full of herbaceous plants and weeds, and said herbaceous plants need somewhere to go.

The progress is almost imperceptible. Only the compost heap gives a clue, having doubled in height.

The mints arc and herbaceous bed beyond it were to occupy the area between the house utility/shower 'extension' and the lilac, which was a gravelled area in which things seeded themselves and failed to grow well, except for Sedum rupestris, which must love the dry, limey conditions, and bramble, which is just a complete thug and grows everywhere. There is some of the troublingly ubiquitous bindweed coming though too. Huge old plants of Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla mollis) and a couple of Hellebores have established themselves right at the edge of the bed, and they will need to go.

I was told by someone, possibly the sellers mentioned it in passing, that there was some concrete under the gravel, but when I had previously stuck a fork in to work some bramble or dandelions out, I didn't find it. This time, having raked off a couple of inches of gravel, I found areas of concrete and patches of fine grade, blue-grey ballast or aggregate. I stuck the pick into the concrete a few times and it broke easily, in some place only half an inch thick or less, in others perhaps a couple of inches. It looked as though there might be a void underneath.

The gravel bed, having found concrete

I suspect it was a level base for a shed, but my neighbours don't know or remember anything about it.

I carried on clearing and digging, creating a sort of terminal moraine of gravel, concrete bits, aggregate and soil under the edge of the lilac. In places the concrete I broke and removed had a layer of aggregate under it, laid on top of a permeable membrane; in some places, that aggregate had another thin layer of concrete underneath it and on the membrane, in some places, stuck to it. So this all became a rather longer job than expected, but isn't that just the way of things?

It would have been so much easier to leave the gravel and use it as an area for pots, but I want to see my plans realised.  Part of that includes recycling the paving slabs donated by my next-door neighbours a couple of years ago into paths between the veg beds, and the gravel, aggregate etc can be recycled into a sub-base for the slabs, along with the rest of the stone I keep digging out of the garden. Another neighbour commented how much concrete and stone she finds in her garden, and how shallow the topsoil is. I would have expected it to be deeper, as these houses were built on damp meadow-land, so I suspect the topsoil was taken off to level the site for building in the 1950s and not put back again. Ah well, all the more reason to make compost.

I've become fitter and able to do enough to work up a sweat. Being out in the garden, with the birds and greenery, has been very enjoyable, my exercise and inspiration, saving my sanity a little in these locked-down weeks.