Garden Thoughts

Where to start? When we arrived it was one big field, long grass, plenty of mint (and not the kind that is very useful) wild ginger and a lot of bracken and bramble. I visited other estrangerios gardens and was totally overwhelmed - where do I begin, is it possible to get where they are. I had to close my eyes to the rest of the garden and start with one chunk and immerse myself in what I was doing and not even think about what was still to be done. Man it was a lot of hard work, especially as I decided to start round the back of the house and this is the area they used for the pig and to throw all their household rubbish. As I pulled and dug, I found old shoes, medicine bottles, broken glass, old broken roof tiles, you name it. Many bucket loads were carted off, rock and earth was moved, just trying to make sense of it all. If you ever have to remove a lot of bracken, let me warn you to hold it as close to the base as possible before pulling it out, otherwise it breaks off and the broken part is sharp as a knife and slices fingers superbly.

Garden before

The lawn had been cut, things had been cleared but what were we going to do with this space, we had never gardened or farmed before. Friends brought round cuttings and we stuck a few things in but still there was this great big open space. I told Nath this space is calling for a labyrinth and he thought it was a pretty cool idea. We started to lay a couple of big rocks and then said this is going to be a bugger to keep the grass short, so that idea went out the window. Next brain wave was to use wine bottles, inverted into the ground and as we have such amazing sunsets at No 32 I liked the idea of the sun reflecting light through the bottles..

Bottles, bottles and more bottles were collected from friends and cafes. I started to dig them in but it didn't look and feel right. To confirm that feeling a friend had just returned from the UK and saw the bottles and said this is absolutely disgusting, so all the bottles were hauled off to the bottle bank, neighbours must have thought I was a secret drinker and that I had been lying to them (I don't drink alcohol)

It was time to get serious and from the labyrinth idea the circular garden was born. I started with one circle and then they became addictive, one more and now I have 4 circles and have raised these beds with the mucking out from the horse riding school. So far so good and now we are leaning towards planting more by permaculture methods ie: companion planting, certain flowers in between for protection from certain insects.

The garden first gave me anxiety and stress, just trying to keep up with the ever growing grass and mess every where and now I see it as the best therapy out there. Planting fruit trees, medicinal herbs and vegetables.

Key is to bite off bit by bit, and enjoy the moment, it slowly evolves and turns into a huge reward.