Tiring and Tying

 

I'm not sure why but I do love my garden. However, toiling for hours to produce fresh produce just at the time it is widely available in the shops and consequently relatively cheap, surely requires some explanation. I think it is that mixture of nature and nurture, not in the sense of the great psychology debate but from the perspective of getting up close and dirty with the first, whilst deriving pleasure and reward from the actual process of rearing all those seedlings and cuttings. Experimentation and creativity abound; the economics of production are irrelevant.

However, there is no doubt that it can be back-breaking and tiring. Since retiring, I have concentrated on trying to reduce some of the more physical aspects of digging and weeding. Consequently, I now have a system for adding compost and turning the soil immediately each bed has been harvested, covering it with a weed suppression fabric until it is time for planting again. In the flowerbeds too, I have begun to use bark chippings to mulch heavily (in some areas on top of weed suppression fabric) all the while conscious of the need to reduce effort. I guess it's one of the sad facts of retirement that at the stage when theoretically you have plentiful time to devote to the garden, the physical energy required slowly begins to deplete.

It's also the time of life when, freed from the constraints of working commitments, you want to be able to get out and about especially when the weather is warm and wonderful. Of course, that's also the same time that the garden needs copious amounts of water, so much so that it's almost embarrassing to ask neighbours (with only 2 or 3 patio-pots) to look after it and you potentially become a hostage to the watering can. 

Our recent trip to the Baltic inevitably coincided with a period of drought, so I spent hours building all kinds of Heath-Robinson self watering devices based on wicking, capillary matting and gravity drip systems. Then when I saw the forecasted temperatures panicked at the thought of evaporation and called on the assistance of a neighbour to keep everything topped up. I don't really want to go away fretting over cucumbers and cucamelons but it does seem to go with the territory of a vegetable patch.

This week I have acquired a solar energy pump and drip kit which I propose putting to the test in the greenhouse before potentially expanding to various pots and planters and perhaps in due course even investing in another to run a soaker hose from the water butts through the vegetable beds. Who could imagine that gardening extends beyond botany and into hydro-engineering?

Seriously though, and with the object of avoiding total subjugation to the needs of  legumes and brassicae, I have concluded that a little like the cultivation of perennial flowerbeds, I am going to have to forsake more of the space in the vegetable patch for permanent crops like rhubarb and asparagus. Move over beetroot, the strawberry farm is imminent. 

Realistically it is important to recognise where enjoyment and practicality end and enslavement or endurance begin. Moreover the boundaries between them shift as we age or priorities alter. I hope it never comes to it, but there is also Plan C: that vegetable plot Mister E constructed in retirement, with its sunken beds and paths in between, could actually make a very attractive rose garden!