Keeping On Top

Forget watering in dry spells and deadheading. The number one rule in all gardening books should be: Keep your mouth closed when you're working with very well-rotted compost. Or perhaps everyone else already knows this? I fiddled around in the bin area for a while but the recent heavy rain has left the piles sodden so I'm leaving them to dry out a bit. Instead I turned to that perennial mountain of weeds, the bottom of the garden. How many times have I laboured down here only to find it's covered again when I turn my back? Too many to count. But you have to have a sense of humour when you're gardening, and a heap of optimism, and I try to cultivate both.

 My spirits were duly exalted when I looked out of my bedroom window at the front garden which I often complain about but which is actually lovely. It's the overview that impresses here. Needless to say there are many weeds but I try to ignore them until I have time to deal with them.

Anyway, I collected so many weeds and branches from the pond area that I decided to store them in the garage until I can take them to the tip. I can't risk leaving them out in whatever rain is to come because they are horrible to transport when they're wet, and any additional soil that comes off them can be swept up and recycled. I'm not just a pretty face. But why oh why didn't I make a gate in the fence between me and the field? There's a whole strip of my land out there where I could have just left the weeds to rot, out of sight. But trekking all the way around with a laden wheelbarrow several times is just too strenuous. Silly old me.

And while I was taking a photo of the weeds I saw a silouette of myself on the ground and photographed that too. I think it's rather flattering, but by then I had washed my hair and changed because I was going out to lunch. What long legs I have. Is it a selfie?

When I came home I toyed with the idea of cutting the grass, but the evening was too lovely to waste and I had already spent most of the weekend labouring in my field. So off I trotted down the lane, and I made a big sweep of it, through Joan and John's garden, round the back of Patrick's, over towards the hall's lodge, up to the top and back along The Street. It took me an hour and a half and it was lovely. The sun set before I was halfway round, but the evening was completely windless and warm, so I had to peel off my over-protective layers. When I came in I looked across my kitchen, and to my astonishment I spotted a snaking path of stones on the windowsill. I know they must have been there at least a couple of weeks, the work of a previous visitor, but I honestly hadn't registered them before. They're not exactly invisible.