Category: Gardening

The neighbourhood cats are using my vegetable gardens as toilets.

A few weeks ago I dug Karen a beautiful little onion patch. Perfect square, with bricks around the edges to stop them from crumbling inwards. The following day, I visited it to inspect my handiwork, and discovered a suspicious circular wet patch in the middle.

Today, I’ve been in the garden mowing, strimming and weeding ((I neglected to clear up the sycamore seeds over the winter, so I’ve had to pull up hundreds of small sycamore trees so far, and there are still a few yet to go.)) However, as I approached my small pea section, I noticed a familiar odour.

I can’t see it, but I can definitely smell it.

One of the neighbourhood cats is using my pea patch as a pee patch.

The other day I got very excited at the prospect of doing some gardening over the weekend. I hadn’t expected it to be quite so cold. However, on Sunday afternoon, after having been party to the sun’s rays for a few hours, the back garden finally warmed up to a bearable temperature, and I ventured out for a couple of hours before the light faded and I was forced back inside.

I raked up leaves on the lawn, and swept up leaves on the patio. I also discarded the remains of a few potted plants which had been abandoned in autumn and left outside all winter. I cut back the ivy on the fence, and dug up some of the larger areas of weeds in the borders with myWell, my dad’s new Okay, technically they are 30 years old, but they are in immaculate condition spadeSome people call a spade a shovel. That’s fine and forkAt this point, I’d usually make a joke, but I’m at a loss.

The compost bin has gone from full to… well, I don’t know what comes after full. It’s not overflowing, it’s just intensely dense.

I hit the garden today. Thump – soil flew everywhere!

Damn – I promised myself that I wouldn’t stoop to such a poor gag. I am weak.

The temperature hovered somewhere around the 5°C mark, and it didn’t seem horrifically unpleasant. I took the decomposables out to the compost heap, and peered into the gloomy rotting contents, trying to imagine in my head what the stuff at the bottom must be looking like by now.

Due to the absence of any leaves on the bushes, this might be the right time to do some tidying up of the borders. I’d be able to reach to the back to extract the aliens, without needing to fight off a combo of attacks from my chlorophyllic nemeses. If the weather isn’t too horrific at the weekend, that would be an ideal way to pass the time. Thank God that Celebrity Big Brother will soon be finished – I made a mistake in sitting down in front of that show a few weeks back. If I had swiftly turned the television set off, I wouldn’t have formed any sort of interest in these people, and I wouldn’t find myself making time at 9pm every evening to watch them.

My problem is that I am bad at keeping plants alive.

In my flat, I generally find that cut flowers outlast a pot plant. This is something that gives me a lot of grief. Why am I so bad at telling when soil is wet or dry? It makes no sense.

And then tonight it came to me. I’m not really actually bad at looking after pot plants. It’s all really to do with my low boredom threshold.

Y’see, I don’t want the same foliage to exist in my flat for more than a week. I want it to change. So the only way to ensure this is to kill it. Murder. Assassination.

Die, plants. Die.