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It’s fairly easy to garden normally, you wander outside & see what needs doing then you either do it or else find a reason why you don’t have to do it right now. You plant stuff, you water it, get rid of the weeds & then it either grows or it doesn’t, it’s not rocket science & is a pleasant way to pass a nice afternoon, however when faced with a blank sheet so to speak things are different. It’s okay at first, or at least it is if you live on my estate since whilst the house is empty all the neighbouring houses seize the chance to dump all their awkward rubbish into the garden so that by the time a new tenant shows up it resembles a landfill site. Once the clearing of mattresses, abandoned wheelie bins & assorted household appliances has been completed though you’re left with a kind of crappy gap between a fence & a hedge & not a clue as to what to do with it. You immediately cut the grass but whilst in a tended garden this immediately lifts the scene positively in a neglected scrap of waste ground all you really achieve is flatter, although it’s something to be able to strim away in the certain knowledge that no damage will be done to any plant worth keeping.

That said it is all a bit depressing, yes there’s the chance to create somewhere without any outside influences & to know that every plant growing was hand picked to be there but it’s daunting as well, the old garden was a place to strive in but it wasn’t a task as such, this is something that needs a real plan & I haven’t got one. For a start there seems to be no part of it that’s screaming out for a veg patch & no surfaces that are in desperate need of attractive climbers, what there is of it resembles a flat triffid that’s out to get me, you can’t cut the grass in places, it just lies down until you’ve gone away. Normally you can take inspiration from what other people around you have planted in their gardens, I’ve had a look & apparently Rottweillers

Needs some work

are popular, in some cases around here the seventies never really went away. Given that huge scary dogs aren’t on my priority list I’ll have to do something else & I have decided to build a few boxes & get some flowers going to cheer the place up but where I’m going to stick a fruit tree in or grow anything to eat is proving problematic. I can’t imagine living anywhere that doesn’t have a spud patch at least but a quick inspection of the soil isn’t encouraging, there’s a fairly big brick component that I reckon the spuds will struggle with so I may be forced to do a great deal more digging than I was planning on just to get something planted. On the plus side I know there’s no bodies buried in my garden, you’d have to build a cairn to hide them because there’s not enough room to get a JCB in.

I know I can make the garden look like a garden again, I know that soon there will be flowers & that next Spring will be an exciting time as I wait & see if I’ve got anything right at all, I’m just not sure that I can cut the garden of my dreams down far enough to fit in here. I don’t really go in for rockeries which is a pity because I could have a major one but with a bag on cement & a bit of work I could make some raised beds I suppose, they’d do for salad if nothing else & maybe carrots because it’s the only way I’ll get any. It will all work out, right now I’m daunted & a bit afraid of rushing into anything, that’s the trouble with gardening really, the possibilities are endless but you have to pick anyway, perhaps I’ll just build a gazebo & hide in it until the Garden Centre’s shut, or maybe I’ll have a sudden rush of sense & start planning for next year instead.

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