Sandy's Garden ... Surprise Surprise

There is no doubt that being able to go outside, to sit and relax with a gin and tonic … when it’s (almost) warm enough … to appreciate the sunshine of recent days and just not to be confined within the four walls of a house for most of the time has made it much easier for us to observe the government’s recommendations to stay at home as much as possible, venturing out only for essential shopping; we don’t even need to leave the garden for our daily exercise … although we have occasionally gone for a walk locally … for there is plenty of exercise to be had there. Most of the garden behind the house enjoys a 210° sweep of open aspect, embracing the east, the south and the west, meaning that from 0600 until 2030 as near as dammit today … April 19 … the sun could shine on it. What a boon! And what better incentive to crush the thought of getting into the car and going for a drive.

It has also meant that I have been slowly catching up on some of those many time-consuming and essentially boring tasks which I have been putting off for far too long, one of which was to tackle the collection of once-wanted items … a long time ago, in some instances … which were subsequently abandoned to their fate in my squirrel-like repository for things I might just want again someday. To give you a better understanding of the location of this store, my greenhouse is a small, lean-to structure with excellent southern exposure but sheltered on its western side by the wall of my neighbour’s garage some metre-or-so distant. This gap has been a useful space in which to lodge my brown garden waste bin … we usually generate more garden waste than the bin can accommodate and still be movable … preferring to bag the waste and take it to the ‘coup’ ourselves. It has also held a green waste bin which, a number of years ago, was wind-blown into our garden and never claimed; and on the greenhouse side of the glazed west wall, I have built up a world-beating collection of empty, robust 70- and 80-litre plastic sacks in which decorative bark, various composts and sundry landscaping materials have been carted home from different suppliers. I haven’t seen the lower panes of glass in this wall for many a long year. What better time to clean up this area?

The two bins were not too difficult to release, even if I did have to return to the house to clean and bandage a couple of nasty scratches. The accumulation of dead leaves, many of which had rotted down to form very solid, nutrient-rich compost was entirely different. This mass of material was bound together by a resolute network of tough roots and needed some serious attacking with a spade and substantial secateurs to prise loose from the paving slab base which I had thoughtfully laid when I assembled the greenhouse. And as I began to see what I was doing, I realised that one of the lower panes of the glazing was broken, a very neat hemispherical portion having detached itself from the still-in-place upper portion of the pane and slipped down from the lower sill to come to rest almost vertically in the detritus! This was surprise number one. But it did explain how, despite the ventilators and door having been tightly-closed, there was ample evidence that rodents of some variety had been lodging in the greenhouse. And surprise number two was finding an old melamine saucer which had once been used as a pot stand resting almost upright in the debris, having presumably been pushed off a shelf and fallen through the hole in the glazing. By Jove, that melamine is tough stuff! After the superficial results of having been half buried in soil for who knows how many years had been scrubbed off, the saucer is almost as good as new. Would that my hands were the same! Now, where did I put the antiseptic cream and the Elastoplast?