This last weekend, Quercus’s mother came back to visit, and, many hands making if not light, then lighter-than-it-would-have-been-otherwise work, we succeeded in dragging ourselves back from oblivion and into some semblance of order, for which read: we rotovated about a quarter of our garden.

Now, that probably sounds like fuck-all, but when you think that said chunk of ex-verdant botanical delight was actually:

- largely covered in lime render;

- wood pile (by which I mean about four tonnes of large logs, waiting to be chainsawn [chainsawn? chainsawed?]);

- home to three bins, two dumpy bags (previously filled with sand, a goodly portion of which had made its way all over the grass, completely obliterating any resemblance to plant life of any sort), a host of assorted pieces of timber, some dead-or-dying potted plants which had also been rendered, mostly, and an old cement mixer;

- also home to Jerusalem artichokes, which are so incredibly hardy as to have grown through three feet of solid Devon clay around the other side of the house; this side, they were just large sticky-stalky bits, having been ignored for over a year, but there was a nice deep pit there too, where we’d bothered to rootle some of the artichokes out at some point;

- full of stacks of old tyres, in which we grew (well, planted and ignored) potatoes, beans, herbs and chard last summer…

… you’ll perhaps see that this was quite a clean-up. I can’t believe how nice it looks out there – it’s just bare soil for now, but we’ve put down a mixture of clover, camomile and straight grass seed, and hopefully a month or so of leaving it to its own devices (provided we get some rain reasonably shortly) should make for a nice place to lounge around in uncharacteristically civilised fashion later in the year. I am debating doing some planting with the small girl – we have seeds kicking about for tomatoes, rainbow chard (which I love love love for its colours, and for the ongoing nature of its production, and for its hardiness in warding of the rampaging snail population, the vast majority of which seems to live in our garden) and possibly some flowers of some sort (though equally I’d like to do amaranths again); part of me thinks we should just focus on getting the house sorted (we have ambitious plans for the rest of this year… for a change), but part of me knows that in order to remain sane, I seem to need to reaffirm my connection to the physical world of creation. Wow. Sorry about that; a phrase that wanky doesn’t normally succeed in passing the bullshit warning lights which inhabit my brain, but that one snuck under the radar somehow, probably by shouting about knitting and waving a ball of wool at my brain as a distraction technique.

Ahem.

Anyway, wanky or not, I do find that I am at my happiest when I’m achieving things; getting this swathe of garden sorted out felt like a very positive thing indeed, and not least because in order to get the lawn area roughly level, we broke open both of the plastic compost bins which live in the chickens’ area. Having grown up with parents whose approach to gardening was a cyclical crash-and-burn experience (in which the hedge got to twelve feet and Dad started to feel that perhaps the time had come to get out a large pair of scissors), I still find it miraculous that you put all those peelings and hen-cleanings-out and odd bits of card and whatnot in a large plastic box and then some time passes, and then? THEN YOU GET COMPOST OUT OF IT! It’s witchcraft, I tell you. And our bins are both empty now, so the witchcraft begins once more.

So. Tyres of veg, of flowers, of bits and bats, and possibly tomatoes in the greenhouse (if I can be bothered to get in there and clean it up; it’s a right state, having been neglected for over a year, and we’ve been letting the chooks in there for the last few days to begin to get a grip on the creepy-crawly population…). Anything else that small children might particularly appreciate growing, chaps?