Raining, luckily, as this was the day that I had marked for the start of the Spring gardening offensive and this year I so don't want to do it. I could spend the next month doing heavy digging and intensive weeding and it would still not be really under control. Get off that beach and take the first plane back here, hippie gardener, you know you want to.

I had, sadly, been seduced by 'The gnittuC Garden' as I have a spare patch of ground which would be perfect for it. She has turned this idea into a major, but still charming, industry and has a website, (moc.nedraggnittuceht.www), which sells seeds and plants as well as flower arranging stuff and things to wear while deadheading. I obviously grew out of the 'I am a romantic countrywoman standing in the sunshine with a trug filled with freshly cut roses' mental scenario many mud-caked years ago. So at least am never tempted by face-framing hats or special aprons with 'twine pockets'. My normal wear is a sweat-marked T-shirt and no socks. The only way to get through the hellish digging is to have some kind of dream vision spurring you on. Therefore......... the cutting garden!

I suppose I should have learnt my lesson about this as I pass various other overgrown corners which were my 'dreams' of earlier years. The 'fruit cage', which, due to stalling on my husband's part, ('To do this properly would cost at least £1,000, which we do not have'), was never actually caged and, although planted with carefully chosen varieties of bush fruit, now only provides early summer sustenance for hundreds of blackbirds who eat everything while still green. The banks of 'meadow flowers' on slopes that are too difficult to mow, which looked perfect the first year when I had planted the seed on bare fresh earth but have been slowly choked by grass until all the pretty wild plants have disappeared and only dandelion-like things remain. 'I hate these f@ckers, they are getting into all the lawns', my husband sets off with a massive plant-death spray. The ornamental pond, with solar water jet and centrepiece to a small rose garden, now somehow green and choked with weeds, (rashly imported by me from the stream when everything looked too bare), which I cannot clear out as two different kinds of spawn are wound amongst them. While the 'rose garden' has been horribly kicked about by the pheasants I encouraged to hide here during the shooting months and one of the crucial 'focal' clumps of rushes is flattened and broken. (A 'well-known trick of foxes' according to an article I came across by accident. There is about a mile of wild rushes only two fields away. Why has this bastard chosen my garden?).

The Spring digging hell was meant to have been solved a few years ago when I read about a 'garden tiller', light and compact and perfect for ladies. This miracle was so easy and fun to use that your plot would be immaculate in a trice and you would laugh at the idea of employing a gardener. So I bought one. It was okay the first year although it didn't start that instantly and involved a lot of mud and wild wrestling as it constantly veered off to the side. If you stopped moving for an instant it dug a huge hole straight down and then stuck, smoking scarily and would often wedge thin stones into its inside and then dare you to put your hand in. It also only ran on a peculiar ratio of oil to petrol and I quite soon lost the instructions and had to guess, 'Do NOT alter these quantities or your machine will be irretrievably damaged'. Could be that's what happened or could be that I got fed up with the whole thing and left it to rust in a damp shed. Who wants to garden as if you were riding a motorbike?

This year I decided to re-think what I actually used. Well, I do need flowers for the house and vast amounts of salad, (God knows how many pesticides are on supermarket stuff), and I really like green beans and runner beans are pretty and last for weeks and spinach and small carrots and lots of different herbs. While potatoes don't do well here because of the 'wilt' and I always plant endless rows and we only eat about a quarter and there are brilliant organic ones in the shop. So that is a massive boring chore removed in an instant. I will have a flower and salad garden. Exactly like the C..... G...... catalogue in fact. Surely I have not been influenced subliminally? (The 'frightfully amusing' vegetable of last year was Cavalo Nero, a dark cabbage-like thing whose seeds had to be specially imported from Tuscany and which was served at many a trendy table and greeted with awe. It tastes just like normal cabbage).

I had noticed that most of the young shoots in the vegetable garden had been eaten right down including all the parsley annoyingly. This garden is up behind the house and we have planted a small wood to the North of it. (You get grants for this and we have planted (or had planted) hundreds of tiny trees all over the farm). This wood was the first one, however, pre-grant, and I actually put in many of the trees and bushes myself, choosing romantic old varieties like ancient crab apples and wild pear with honeysuckle and 'wayside mix' wild flower seeds where it met the drive. So I like to wander in it, smugly, thinking, 'I made this'. (It is SMALL). For the last year, however, things have become a little stressful as the wood has been taken over by a rabbit. When we first came they were everywhere but not near the house. I love rabbits and was sorry when the population dwindled to nothing, probably because the shoot in the wood was rearing more pheasants and so many more foxes moved in. So .... when I first spotted a tiny rabbit in our wood I was thrilled. It must have been brought up there by a 'wild' cat and then got away. Quite quickly the rabbit grew vast and imposing. Every time I walked into 'my' wood he was sitting there, staring at me. If I saw him first I felt compelled to back away silently and go home or if I didn't he would throw himself hysterically into some prickly holly bushes so I felt guilty, and went home. I have pretty much given up going there and wasn't thinking about it until yesterday I was pottering along the drive, in fact pondering about varieties of salad, when far in front of me I saw a huge rabbity figure cross the path and, in a practised and purposeful manner, push through the hedge into the vegetable garden. Crap. Now it all falls into place - the general nibbling, the lack of parsley AND those droppings by the pond which I had attributed to a small, constipated deer. What shall I do? Not only was I actually feeling really happy about the new form of garden but fun seeds have already started arriving in the post. (Not Cavalo Nero). I can't bear to put in all that effort and then have all the seedlings eaten. There is no way of rabbit-proofing the hedge and also there is no way that I would hurt, or knowingly upset, the rabbit. Why is life never simple?


- posted by Iris @ 3/18/2004 10:21:00 AM comment