The digging continues

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Having dug one of the two circular beds I planned for either sides of the garden, I got our trusty spade and fork out and started digging. The second bed was certainly interesting to say the least.

Apart from the next door neighbours kitten who seemed to think our garden was his, the amount of rubble that came out of this plot was mind boggling. If I didn’t get a handful of cat poo when breaking up clums of earth, I got a handful of old bricks, rusty nails, shards of glass and other bits and pieces that at one time must have come from either an old army base (we found some old bullets) or some old house that had been cleared and demolished. The amount of old broken bits of tiles, cups, plates and the like was enormous.

Digging was certainly kept interesting. At times I felt like a member of the Time Team and loved sharing the treasures I’d dug up. The best bits are now on display in our cabinet, like the Victorian dress button we found, the ammo, the little plastic toy soldiers and more recently the old eye glass (sadly no frames or the other glass). The soil in this part of the garden was dry and poor and needed a lot of mushroom compost and horse manure to put some goodness back into it. It’s still dry even though at one point there must have been a well underneath it, that has been capped off.

It was around this time as well that we were given our first plants. One overcast afternoon, tired of digging, I decided to explore the area we had moved to. On my way back from a long walk through part of Thorndon Park, I was admiring some of the old weatherboarded cottages along the way in Herongate (the neighbouring village). As I was busy taking pictures of a lovely cottage style planted front garden, the owner came out. After explaining I was not a member of the “Best Front Garden Contest” jury but a recent addition to the Ingrave & Herongate parish (the border between the villages runs down the centre of the communal cricket green). After getting acquainted I was taken down the back to see the rest of his garden.

Almost an hour later I went back home carrying a binliner with 4 sunflower plants, a handful of fresh radishes, a seed tray full of marigolds and another one full of young leeks and the assurance that if I ever needed anything from his garden all I needed to do was knock on his door and he’d dig me up whatever I liked.

Don’t you just love fellow gardeners?!

second circular bed, digging nearly finished

Just one of many buckets of rubble. The smaller stones were used to edge the pallets and the shed. Yellow, white and red flint stones were used to create a pebble mosaic of a white bird with red heart flying over a yellow hill during sunset, larger grey and black smooth pebbles were used to create grey clouds and a ‘mountain’.

some of the smaller stones and rubbles, used to edge the wood pallets

• 24 Aug, 2009
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