Sunday 16 February 2014

Shovels and spades

As well as the novelty of staying somewhere with stairs, we've also being adjusting to having a garden. I have never, in my entire life, had an outdoors space I owned. We are both really looking forward to growing things.

The only problem is that the previous owners weren't into gardening, and the biggest usable plot was gravelled over.

About a month ago, I organised for someone who wanted gravel to take most of it away, but - annoyingly - he took the clean stuff on top and left the dirty and hard to dislodge bits underneath.

So for the past few weeks, whenever we have had a dry day at the weekend, we've been using a riddle (ie, a box with criss crossing metal wires at the bottom) to separate the gravel and the soil.

We also had a bizarre day last weekend where we went driving around the coast looking for seaweed but failed to find any. Then spent part of yesterday picking up bits and pieces of kelp before finding an enormous bank of seaweed just along the beach.

So most of this afternoon has been spent finally ridding ourselves of the gravel, digging in the seaweek, and removing random bits of brick and pipe from the bed.

We have potatoes sprouting in the garage, and some peas. We have a big patch of earth, which doesn't look like much, but is the beginnings of a vegetable garden. I'm absolutely exhausted from doing the most physical work I've done in years. But it is all very satisfying.

2 comments:

  1. I'm looking forward to hearing of your gardening exploits. And I imagine you showing the Boy that you can eat things from the ground, pulling that first carrot.

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  2. Citygirl here. Why on earth do you need seaweed for a vegetable garden?? Isn't salt bad for soil?
    yay for satisfying physical work! is it something you can do as a family?
    And if you ever pull those carrots I have a recipe for carrot burgers. Will you try and grow some herbs as well? that recipe wants chives and mint too.... ;-)

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