One of the many resolutions I have made this year is to make 2013 the year of the garden (a flourish of trumpets, Huzzah!). I have a patch at the very bottom of the garden that I have been half-heartedly working on for a couple of years. Our house dates roughly back to the thirties and it looks as though the earth at the bottom of the garden is largely made up of the rubbish and rubble of those years. The first order of the day was to clear the ground of the glass and metal and brick and rubble of the past - buckets and buckets of the stuff. Shards of glass abound and big chunks with wicked jagged edges making thick leather gloves an essential part of proceedings. Wire and abstract pieces of strange metal grills cut through the earth and every excavation means another dice with tetanus or laceration - or both.
By the second year - the summer of 2012 I had cleared about half the area, the other half given over to lopsided stacks of wood, some rotting and some still good and solid. I would have bursts of activity, then life took over and my neglect allowed the weeds to take over and choke the plants, lack of watering caused the lettuces to bolt and a long holiday over the precious weeks of the summer finally did for the lot.
But this year things will be different, I have my seed packets safely filed away in the appropriate month in my homemade seed box, this year is the Year of the Garden...I spent time today attacking the brambles, huge and vicious and looping through and around the plot like a spiky octopus. It hasn't made a huge difference, but it's a start...
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