Ive done my new year’s resolutions for this year but with the few lovely days of sun we’ve had recently I feel compelled to write about my hopes for the garden in the coming summer. The sun always brings with it a feeling of anticipation for the warm days to come.
It needs a good tidy that’s for sure, the garden. There are dead tomato plants hanging around from last year’s attempts to be self sufficient in the tomato department, which ended up leggy and unyielding anyway. The trellis Ben put up has yet to be covered in some beautiful climbing plant. The wisteria plant I put in to grow up it last year is not looking too healthy, It’s one fragile stem is clinging on for dear life but I’m hoping it will suddenly spring to life once it feels the sun’s rays, but we shall see.
Ben has yet to finish the paving stones out the front of the house. Two large bags of sand sit there from last autumn, spade by spade slowly being emptied by the boys who seem to like to spread it everywhere, leaving little piles of it in random places. Ben hated laying the stones and I swear he shrinks in fear each weekend we have warm weather believing I will be pushing him out there to finish the job.
For the last three years we’ve had a dead eucalyptus tree in our garden and since the strong winds in December one of the main branches of it has been lying on the ground, having fallen into next door’s garden. We had to retrieve it from their flat bush and it now lies, dead and forlorn on our grass. It is in need of chopping up and adding to the wood pile for firewood. This of course means that I cannot mow the lawn until it’s done.
My garden at present is strewn with toys, it looks a bit like a warzone actually. Toy cars and trucks spill out from the sand pit. The ride ons, their once bright colours faded in the sun, are randomly placed around the garden, crushing plants. Spades and rakes and two battered toy lawnmowers fester forlorn looking in the undergrowth.
The sandpit, a gift made by Ben’s own hands for Sam’s birthday last year is devoid of sand. The boys have seen fit to systematically remove it from its usual place of residence to the ground around and about. I don’t know why but I’m sure they have good reasons. More sand has been placed in front of the house where the boys have been ‘building houses’ with the small leftover pieces of patio brick that Ben has left lying around and that I break my neck to avoid tripping over each time I enter or leave the house.
I remember a time, well last year actually when I demanded that all the toys had to be in their proper place in the garden every evening, I even had Ben erect a small children’s shed to house them all which now stands empty and redundant. The sand had to be kept in the sand pit and god help any child who moved a spadeful of sand an inch outside the said pit. But, to be perfectly honest I just don’t have the energy to argue with the boys about it anymore. I let them just get on with what they want to do (as long as it keeps them quiet) and I deal with the aftermath, well, afterwards.
At present we’ve also got a disowned integrated oven sitting just outside our front door, well of course we have! Its been sitting there for near on a month now going rusty. The boys are having great fun jumping on it and putting things, their heads mostly, in it! No doubt my voice will be hoarse from all the shouting I’ll have to do before my beloved and darling husband deigns fit to actually move it out of my eyesight.
Needless to say the side beds are looking weedy and unloved… I shan’t go on. Suffice to say that my garden is like my life in many ways – a right old bloody mess, good intentions turn to shit with bad weather. I’ll just sit back and watch my hard work from last year get destroyed by my little treasures and when the sun shines I will start all over again.