The three growing seasons this garden has experienced have each time provided a mass of plants throughout the summer months giving the perception of a wonderful looking garden. With the abundance of plants, I have been able to hide in plain sight the more questionable areas I’ve had in the garden.
Summer was a much better time to be working in the garden, after rain the areas that I would access often would dry out. The rest of the year the garden often became very muddy where I needed access to certain areas like the compost bins or where I would spend time repotting or sowing seeds in trays and pots. Having no clean area to work has been a major drawback that leads to often not bothering to do things.
Come winter I found it hard to hide all the things I tend to gather throughout the year, the many items that may be useful at some point.
When there are no plants as such in the garden, the tarps stand out. I also tend to have lots of bags with a variety of things inside, everything from compost waiting to be put onto the garden, wood for burning, endless bags full of plant pots.
Those true permaculture people will understand this need for collecting tat very well. It would be nice to have a garden free of tarps and tat.
I still have a couple of patches of lawn that I’m desperate to get rid of. One of these patches looks quite nice in summer after I’ve had to get the lawnmower out to cut it.
Summer is also the time when I don’t spend too much time working whilst on the lawn sowing seeds into seed trays, etc so it stays nice. It’s during the time of year when I'm sowing seeds that the lawn becomes more mud than grass due to the only place in the garden where I have a bit of space to work. Other times this spare bit of space that was formally known as a lawn tends to get filled with bags of useful items adding an air of junkyard to the garden.
I also enjoy using tarps to cover my compost heaps, tarps are very useful when I’m composting the beech hedge trimmings to help generate some heat to speed the process up. I also have a fully dedicated area for tat. Of course, I cover this with a very large tarp. As much as I enjoy tarps, I would like to not have to see so many of them in the garden.
The raised bed that runs part of the length of the path has been very productive these past few years but sadly the timber that holds the soil is starting to rot. This was recycled timber when I set the bed up, so I knew it had only a few years of life left in it.
Not being one to miss an opportunity to use an extra trap in the garden, I have one over the top of my wormery it serves two purposes, one to keep the rain out and the other to give a space for air to circulate the wormery. Where the wormery currently sits gets full sun all day long. Hot sun and worms do not go very well together and if you are not careful you end up with a very bad smell.
When it’s dry accessing both the wormery and the main compost heap where I compost my everyday kitchen waste is not a problem. When it’s wet it gets very muddy and very slippery, this is not good and means I need to put shoes on to put anything into the compost. This becomes a hassle over something that should not be this difficult. I've also sat down in the mud a couple of times when putting things into the compost heap.
I don’t mind when a crop takes over the path because I know it’s only temporary and I’ll be harvesting lots of food in due course but there are times when I need to think about other people. The postman and delivery people also need access to my front door so having control over certain beds to prevent the plants from taking over should be a consideration.
Interestingly nobody ever trod on any of the plants that wanted to be on the path. There must be something about the path that the plants like.
