Spring Is Here, And So We Ramp Up The Garden Adventures

Out of nowhere it feels like winter has retreated to a seat out the back, and made room for spring to have its time in the spotlight. Sure, the weather isn’t super warm just yet, but if you’ve been following the weather forecast with any sort of focus (I have, because I am crocheting a “weather scarf” – more on that another time), you’ll definitely have noticed that the mornings aren’t quite so brisk, and the now sunlit evenings don’t also have that bone-chilling factor that makes you want to go back indoors pronto.

Spring gives me a sort of “hurry up” feeling; that desire to do EVERYTHING NOW, and if possible, get it done YESTERDAY. There’s more hours in the day, but at the same time, I’m overcome by a need to do even more than what I’ve set as my daily tasks. My daughter moved to Canada last year, leaving me the only female in a testosterone-fuelled household. But feel for the men in my house, not for me. They’re subject to my whims of DO IT NOW, and it’s vastly at odds with their laissez-faire attitudes.

It seems I’m not the only one who has that hurry up feeling when it comes to spring – and no, I’m not talking about my family. Over the winter we dug out our side front garden, so we could put our garbage bins there, instead of having to move them from the back garden every bin day. In so doing, we dug up a rose bush, along with several other plants.

It seems we didn’t dig them all out…because what should confront us on, appropriately, the Vernal Equinox, was this:

Yep. That’s not just one, but two fully formed daffodils climbing out from underneath a thick application of weed matting and many, many, bags of gravel and pebbles. As Dr Ian Malcolm so famously said in ‘Jurassic Park’, “Life…uh…finds a way.”

Jeff Goldblum  Life Finds a Way Steven Spielberg Movie HD Jurassic Park  Movie CLIP

It was my birthday at the end of January, and so I bought myself some large planters for the garden, as part of my vision. I asked my menfolk to build them, and finally – I managed to convince the younger men of the house to get out there and do it for me. Not my husband. Just my 3 sons.

So first off, the two younger of the 3 get out there and start building. I was watching from the kitchen window, until I had to move upstairs so I could no longer see anything and therefore resist rushing out there to do it myself. Sure, I could have, but this is an exercise in teaching them how to work together as a team, and also they usually get it done a lot faster than I can. Usually.

Please excuse the very blurry photos, taken through my not very clean kitchen window.

For whatever reason, they decided to build both at once, rather than the pair of them building the one planter together. This went well for about half an hour before they realised that this was at least a 2, if not 3, person job. After hearing a lot of arguing from my upstairs vantage point, I asked their elder brother to go out and help.

It didn’t take very long at all for him to get frustrated with both of them, and order them indoors to let him get on with it. He also didn’t last very long in this decision, and called back his middle brother.

Eventually they built one panel. They’d been out there for 3 hours, it was starting to get dark.

That was Sunday. Yesterday the youngest son had to go to school, so he very gratefully escaped having to help again. I pointed out that we had several trestles upon which they could rest the pieces, and when they finally worked out what I was talking about, and what I meant, they made quick work of the second panel, thinking they’d had enough for the day. Well! Did I have news for them! I wanted the side panels added as well.

By the time it came to adding the second side panel, this was now a job for three people, so of course, I had to go out there and help. And while it SHOULD have been an easy enough task to get the fourth panel attached…we were all knackered. So this is how it is today:

Will we get done today? That remains to be seen. I have however decided we don’t need to do both planters, as I over-estimated how much space they took up. This planter will easily fill the space taken up by all of the burlap bags. I’m hoping to move the smaller greenhouse to the space behind that area, which is currently filled with apple crate planters.

I’ve been doing plenty of seed sowing as well, and potting on some seedlings, but these are things I’ll cover in another post.

About the author

Lisa has been writing for over 20 years, starting as the entertainment editor on her university newspaper. Since then she's written for Popwrapped, Maximum Pop, Celebmix, and ListenOnRepeat.

Lisa loves all good music, with particular fondness for Jedward and David Bowie. She's interviewed Edward Grimes (Jedward), Kevin Godley, Trevor Horn, Paul Young, Peter Cox (Go West), Brendan B Brown (Wheatus), Bruce Foxton (The Jam), among many many more. Lisa is also available for freelance writing - please email lisa@essentiallypop.com

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