Ten Tunes to Garden To

Off the top of my head...


1. Unit 4 Plus 2 - The Concrete and the Clay
(see previous post)

2. Crowded House - Four Seasons in One Day
(Self-explanatory. We're in Britain.)

3. The The - Love Is Stonger Than Death
("Here come the blue skies/ Here comes springtime/ When the rivers run high and the tears run dry/ When everything that dies... shall rise." )

4. Galliano - Earthboots

5. Yasmin Levy - Kondja Mia, Kondja Mia (My Rosebud, My Rosebud)

6. U2 - Wild Honey
("Are you still growing wild/ With everything tame around you?/ I send you flowers/ Cut flowers for your hall/ I know your garden is full/ But is there sweetness at all?") + Local interest.

7. Louis Armstrong - What a Wonderful World
("I see trees of green/ Red roses too/ I see them bloom/ For me and you...")

8. KT Tunstall - The Beauty of Uncertainty
(Yup. That's gardening.)

9. Elvis Costello - Tramp the Dirt Down.
(David Cameron's "Thatcherism with a heart - honest" conference speech reminded me exactly how much I'm looking forward to blasting this out at full volume whilst giving a whole new meaning to the term "champagne socialist" - but for the time being, via headphones whilst stamping in grass seed will have to do...)

10. The Beatles - Blackbird.

Any other suggestions?

Ten Types of Crap Dug Out of Our Garden

1) Bricks (Half- and Whole)
2) Smashed roof-slates
3) Chunks of concrete
4) Fragments of window glass
5) Shards of broken beer bottle
6) Bones. Probably of the pets of long-grown children...
7) Rusty bits of metal, including something that looks like it broke off an anchor
8) Broken crockery
9) Clothes-pegs, and other random plastic, including -
10) A mystifying number of empty biro casings.

Any DIYers, glaziers or barbecue-going litter-bugs who've stumbled on this, please take note: It's the glass that's really objectionable. I just know I can't have got all of it, and look forward to ripping my gloves/fingers on it for years to come. Is it really such a hassle to take it to the dump? Or find a recycling bin?

Ten Things That Have Happened in Our Garden This Year

1) One of the "shrubs" at the back blossomed, and turned out to be an almond tree. Result!

2) In April, it snowed:















Pretty!

3) I made a shade chart in around May, to figure out where to put the vegetable bed. Turns out it will be quite a good use for the bare ground left by the anhililation of the nasty furry-leaved weed patch.

4) It rained. And rained. And rained some more.

5) I marked out the area for the veg patch and covered it with black plastic for the remainder of the growing season, having read somewhere that this would kill off any further weeds in the ground by denying them sunlight. Hmm. We'll see...

6) We replanted the lawn. This happened sporadically, as I was using the "glycophosphate as many celendines and dandylions as I can see, dig over and put down new grass seed in the resulting bare patch" method. Pretty stupid really, as it kills off at least as much grass as weeds. Spouse did point this out, but there's a reason I sign these posts "Contrary Mary". Lesson learned. I'm using a trowel now.

7) There was a warm spell, resulting in much lawn growth.

8) I might have killed off the Japanese Knotweed in the gravel and behind the shed. But I'm not putting money on it (despite it's being a better bet than shares in Morgan Stanley).

9) The squirrels ate all our pears.

10) Spouse got some garden furniture.
It promptly started raining again.
Spouse not impressed.

So here's how things looked at the end of August: