Then I rang Mark and whined that it was going to take hours and I didn't want to do it. (and bloody well didn't intend to either). We exchanged a few cross words, mostly based around my effort versus paying someone else and washing our hands of it and the fact that I said I would rather be putting this sort of effort into our own garden, not into a patch of land we intended to give up in a month anyway. He countered this by saying that I wouldn't put that much effort into our garden, which carried a nasty grain of truth in it. Just to prove that I can act upon good intentions if I so choose, I came back and de-weeded/cleared one particularly nasty patch lurking at the end of one of the potato patches. Then I gathered up all the weedy shite from our garden and wheelbarrowed it down to the allotment for disposal in 'our' compost bins. By this time I was sweating, filthy and seen more insects than you could shake a stick at, and I hate that. As Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen once said, 'that's the trouble with being outdoors, it's so full of nature.' ha ha. Give me my apron and kitchen any day. Less crawly wildlife to contend with.
Anyhoo, the upshot of the allotment debacle is that a couple of emails later has negotiated us a month to move our shed, voluntarily giving up said plot and no mention of payment for some other bod to come in and 'do'. I know it seems terribly cavalier, but I am glad to be rid of it. We applied for it before we moved here, when we didn't have growing space, and then got offered it just after we got here with it's humongously large garden. Having waited over a year for it, I was loathe to turn it down, so we took it and spent the first two years of having ridiculous amounts of veg which we couldn't eat/freeze/preserve or give away fast enough to keep up. And that's the story of the allotment.
A display of a complete lifecycle on one bush.
And I thought I was confused.
That is indeed quite a lot of bindweed! I think you've made a good decision here - sometimes with the best will in the world things don't work out as well as intended and there's nothing wrong with going with the flow on that when in one's heart one knows one is fighting a losing battle to do otherwise. I don't mind some bugs - wasps (in restrained quantities), woodlice (outside only), ants (unless they are those horrible fat swarming ones although again strictly outside only) but of course we are moving towards September which is the dreaded beefy spider season. These I can't stand inside or out and tend to shriek in a pathetically feeble way when confronted by them unexpectedly. Can deal (just) with smallish ones but not the September rugby-playing variety! E x
ReplyDeleteHa ha - I can picture the shrieking - it exactly the right word to describe that sudden intake of breath accompanied by a girly noise.......
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