Helen's Garden Renovation Project

It rained on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Today, by some oversight, it forgot to rain in the morning and I went out with my pickaxe to break up some more of the path. This kept me warm and the noise helped to drown out the radio played by the builders of the extension next door. I collected up the cat mess. There wasn’t much, probably because it has been so cold and wet. No doubt the owners have had to change their cat litter more frequently than usual because the cats haven’t fancied using other people’s gardens for their toilets. My heart bleeds for them.

After I had broken up some of the path I wandered around, picking up bits of conifer, autumn leaves, twigs and beech nuts, with my poor soft winter muscles trembling from the unaccustomed exertion. No, that’s not quite fair. I did get quite fit shovelling snow in January. But I’ve had most of February to get unfit again. I thought about what I need to do now, and realised it was quite simple. I need to get all my plants and rubble over to the right hand side of the garden, leaving the left clear for the works to take place. This will mean using some of the bits of path to stand plant pots on. So I will get on and do that.

The rain started again this afternoon, as forecast. I need it to stay dry for six hours so I can squirt the lesser celandines with glyphosate, but I don’t think that’s going to happen this week. On the plus side, I saw that my purply-red hellebore was covered in buds, and unfurling its pretty little leaves. And hardly anything has died.

During the snow, the spam comments to my blog dropped off sharply. Now they are back in force. I am also getting some which may be genuine, although are clearly not well-targetted. I would like to invite C Brakewell, who suffers from the most common kind of colour-blindness, deuteranopia, and claims that my site is hard to read, to take the trouble to specify exactly which parts he can’t read before asking me to revamp my whole website. And Joseph McElroy may well be right when he says that the K-Melon [sic] browser can’t display my website, but he should take it up with WordPress and not me.

It’s about two months since I last made any proper attempt to do some gardening, so I haven’t written anything in my blog either. I am not dead. Neither, I am pleased to say, are most of my plants. I have doubts about my jasmine (officinalis, not nudiflorum) which is looking very shrivelled, and my osteospermums in pots may have carked it too. However, my big clump of osteospermum in the front garden has probably made it through, and the stuff in pots was only offshoots of the big clump. The pelargoniums are dead, but then they are meant to be.

The sun came out this morning, and I raked the leaves off the front lawn. I also walked round the back garden and tried to remember what I was doing. I picked up some bits of dead wood and pulled out some bittercress. And then the men building the extension of the house that backs onto mine came back from wherever they had gone to, and started shouting and playing their radio, and I went indoors again. One step at a time.