Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Monday 19 May 2008

A garden is a toilsome thing

I'm a lousy gardener because I lack faith in what I do around the garden. This moral crisis hardly fits in with the aims of my own blog so I made a full confession on that of a friend who pursues horticulture and other ennobling matters. One of his commentators provided me with a partial absolution and I'm now doing as well as can be expected.

I also hate gardening toil and with good reason. Our present plot has a sub-stratum of builder's rubble which makes planting even a single petunia a Herculean proposition. Removing the rubble would mean first killing off all the plants and bushes already installed and I don't have that kind of vision.

It's taken me a decade but I have finally eased the digging problem somewhat. A spade with a narrower blade is much more useful for getting rid of buried half-bricks. I suspect this is first and last gardening tip to appear on Works Well. For a more uplifting point-of-view on the world of flowers try my friend's blog http://bestofnow.blogspot.com/

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I can see the advantage of the narrower blade. I couldn't manage the wider one. I wonder what you think of the garden fork? With technology in view, what do you think of the hoe, and if you do think about it at all, what sort of hoe do you use?

Roderick Robinson said...

Amazing! I never imagined my post on such an alien subject would be prolonged into comment. Forks I do not understand - they bend threateningly. My first hoe was attractively cheap and has a rectangular blade not much larger than the celebratory postage stamps brought out at Christmas. The second is a conventional hoe-type hoe. Both gather dust. I am a devoted user of Teram, the membrane that resembles a thin sheet of fibre-glass, costs a fortune and is death to weeds.

Lucy said...

Likewise we use large quantities of black plastic to kill off weeds, but it doesn't make for a very attractive garden. We once borrowed some goats but they had to live chained, and occasionally the urge to eat bark became so overpowering they acquired the strength of ten and wrenched and bent their tethering irons and headed for the ornamental shrubs.

French garden spades are the most unusable things, I'm fairly sure French garden tools haven't been reviewed since Roman times.