It seems that when I am busy and actually have something to write about then I am too busy to write it up in here. On same ole, same ole days there is nothing to write about anyway. So I am making a point of sitting here on this wet chilly morning while having my first cup of tea andciggie of the day to do at least a little write up of this last week.
My youngest GG had asked me to buy her a trampoline for her birthday. That bit was easy, but the getting my Daughters garden ready for a giant trampoline was not so easy.
Measuring the space to put the tram. was ok. Yep it would fit in and still leave room for all to walk down the path to get to the garage, shed and green house, (such as it is). But…………. Sarah, being one of these people that thinks gardens take care of themselves had found herself with nature taking back it’s own out there.
Flower beds that once, I would imagine held beautiful displays now could barely be seen through the undergrowth and there was even a small tree that had taken root and was merrily making it’s way towards heaven, already being 7 foot tall, albeit a skinny sad looking thing.
Along the right hand side of the whole of the garden the lawn had shrunk by 4 foot with the climbing greenery that should have only taken up a foot wide and climbed the fence actually not only climbing way passed their required height but also deciding to spread themselves slowly towards the neighbour on the left hand side.
Sarah, recovering from a mishap earlier in the week decided she would have the energy to tackle the job of recovering the lawn by havingsecateurs in hand chop back the escaping climbers while I should tackle what was once flower beds.
With Sarah not being an established gardener tools were pretty thin on the ground. My allotted tools consisted of, a garden fork, and a hand held pair ofsecateurs.
First of all I had to have a bit of a scout around to see where the paving and path ended and the garden began. You may think that is easy, not so, the garden had decided that we should no longer have a patio or pathway and had been slowly creeping over both.
I found the garden and made my first attack with the fork. Breathing a sigh of relief because the fork actually slid easily into the soil, (we have had a lot of rain) I started to turn the dirt over and low and behold I discovered that some bright spark in the past had decided to cover the flowerbeds with polythene, on top of which they had laid a thin scattering ofpebbles , presumable to stop weeds growing through. Well, their idea just hadn’t worked. Great!!! so now I am having to fight passed weeds, grass, the odd tree to pull up and off the polythene which is leaving the pebbles on the soil. The polythene is so old and so rotten it is coming up in my hands in approximately foot square pieces, leaving the patch looking even worse. Ever wish you hadn’t started something???
So now I have the polythene, some weeds, some soil, and some pebbles in an ever enlarging pile on the patio. I can now pick up the fork and start attempting to dig and turn the soil, hopefully succeeding to remove all other undergrowth. First couple of fork fulls goes like a dream. This isn’t going to take me long now me thinks. Oh how bloody wrong I was. What did I come across next??? Roots, roots and more roots, half inch indiameter roots. So every fork full I had to scrummage in the dirty hole I had made to cut the roots out by hand. The roots were coming from that blasted tree that had planted it’s self and from a rather nice bush which I intended to keep there.
I wont bore you with the pain I suffered or the fear that I would never get the job done. Needless to say I made headway as theafternoon got on until I came to that scraggy blasted tree. Sorry it had to go. It was the thinnest, sickest, saddest looking bit of growth I had ever seen in my life. I spent the next hour digging around it’s base, cutting it’s roots and finally with a lot of twisting, pulling, pushing I got that evil looking thing out of the ground to join the rest of the rubbish on the patio.
It was at this point in time I looked up to see how Sarah was getting on. Bloody hell, she had been more vicious than I had. I thought I was bad. She had totally taken every bit of greenery down growing on the right hand 6 foot fence and onto the lawn and dumped it in a huge pile in the middle of the garden. My first thought was “shite, how the heck are we going to get rid of that lot”. I kid you not. That pile was6ft x 6ft by 6ft high. Voicing my concerns to Sarah as to it’s disposal she told me not to worry, it would go in her car down to the tip. Yea right!!! she has a Cleo. No time to worry about that now as I am gasping for a cup of tea and aciggie not having stopped since we started, which seems like the day before.
No time, we have to go collect the girls from school. Well, I don’t care what happens, I’m having a tea and fag when I get back.
School run, kids back, half a cup of tea and a fag later we are back in the garden, this time with the girls help. Or so we thought. The eldest is out there for all of ten minutes, decides that she would rather go in and to bed for a kip before dinner. So after mumbling under my breath about her being a selfish,self-centred mare-bag, I get stuck back in to my part of the garden while little Jess goes down and works like a Trojan with her Mum for a while and then up to me to see what she can do to help me. The three of us ploughed on.
Shortly after, Jess and I had a discovery. We found that there was a path running through the middle of the flower bed leading up to a circular bit ofornamental paving which was also hidden underneath greenery.
Calling it a path is a bit ambitious because it was in fact a four paving stones just laid one after the other with a six inch gap between them. I have an idea. After Jess and me cleaning off the paving stones and finding where they end and where the next bit of garden starts we dig out and down about 5 inches between them making mini ditches. We then go and rescue the mini stone chippings that I had dug out of the other part, wash them and put them in the now ditches between the paving slabs. It looks good, should cut down on weeds and it defines the path more.
That’s it for today. My back is killing me, I can’t even stand up straight. I don’t think my hips will ever be the same and I feel100. Time to stop. Sarah cooks dinner after which she drives me home for the night.
The following day
Sarah picks me up at 8.45am after dropping the girls off at school. I am not looking forward to the day.
It has been decided that rather than attempt to get all the rubbish into the car and make goodness knows how many journeys, we would go buy a garden rubbish burner from Argos. £25. Well worth it we thought.
As we all know everything from Argos comes flat packed. So we set to to put this thing together, no problem because Sarah and I areveterans at putting up Argos flat packs.
Being 60 years old and my whole childhood having to start fires from scratch I started to tell Sarah how to lay a fire. I had already done a bit of cheating and we had bought some fire lighters from B & Q. Sarah being Sarah and not listening properly, while my back was turned lay the fire in her own way by chucking a couple of fire lighter in, on top of that she threw sheets of newspaper (not tightly rolled up as should be) then on top of that piled a few sticks mixed in with large amounts of grass, then set fire to it. It was at this point I turned around and saw what she had done. Needless to say the paper took quite nicely and then the whole thing burnt out. Trying to explain how to restart the whole thing Sarah took ascriticism and got upset so I calmed the waters and let her get on with it.
Finally she had a fire going. Feeding it was as a scene out of a comedy. Trying to keep it fed quicker than it was burning we had to chop the rubbish into smaller pieces withsecateurs and one of us keep throwing the stuff in. Because the stuff wasn’t totally dry it was making the most horrendous black smoke which in turn was making our eyes water so we couldn’t see and our noses run.
My nose began to run like a tap so I had to hare indoors to get some loo roll. Blowing my nose and then throwing it on the fire we discovered awondrous thing. Loo roll burns so hot it can start a fire all by it’s self. I would hate to see a loo roll factory go up. But from then onevery-time the fire looked like dying we through about 6 sheets of loo roll screwed up onto it and it kept the blaze going.
Time to pick up the kids and we couldn’t leave the fire burning so we let it go out. Sarah’s face was a picture. Mascara dripping down so badly that she looked like a black and white minstrel.
By the time we got back with the kids we were sooooo tired we gave up burning for the day having burnt at least half of the rubbish. We decided that burning the rubbish was just to hard and too time consuming that we decided to chop all the rest in small bits and put in garden sacks to take to the tip after all.
Aimee once again went for her late afternoon kip and Jess helped Sarah and I bag up the rest, put the bags in the garage ready for a tip run another day. The following day the heavens opened and it has been raining since then. At least there is now room for the trampoline. I can finish the flowerbeds and Sarah can seed the crappy lawn later this week on a fine day.
Needless to say I was glad when the weekend came and so pleased to see rain so that I could have a rest.
