In the garden of pain

After a rather good Friday night, I spent most of Saturday getting re-acquainted with the sofa whilst Louise was off buying plants for the garden. So, when Sunday rolled around and the weather was fair, we headed out into the garden.

Although to be completely honest Louise headed out into the garden and I delayed the inevitable as much as possible. I did eventually go out and pick up spade and fork to help dig over the neglected sideborder in the back garden. Now our soil sits on clay, and I don’t mean it’s a bit clay-like I mean if you dig down about six inches you can cut out neat blocks of clay from the under the soil. It’s heavy going and of course being largely made of clay our garden develops a solid baked crust that took a pickaxe to get through yesterday.

Turning over that kind of soil is bloody hard work, so why we decided to tackle the much bigger job of digging up one of the old iron clothes poles, I’ll never know.

Alas we failed to dig out the large concrete block as, whilst trying to wiggle it free, the rusted and rotten iron clothes pole started to bend and, very quickly started to break. Thankfully it was at very close to ground level so with a whacks of a sledgehammer the edges were round off, leaving me covered in rusty, watery gunk from inside the broken off stump of the pole. An exotic grass planted next to the stump finishes off the job.

Needless to say that, after some digging, and generally exerting some force on a fairly solid object, I’m a little bit achey in places I’d forgotten I had. Well, at least since the time when… ahhh.. but that’s another story.