Friday 19 July 2019

Weeding? 

It’s raining....dark outside and damp....thank you God.  I enjoyed the glorious summer days a lot but now it feels like it’s back to normal! 

I do regret that it’s raining whilst my gardener is here but he just gets on with everything regardless...in his car are several coats...when one gets wet through he changes into a dry one!   I have tried on previous occasions to give him jobs to do in the dry...I  have a nice big barn. ...but he just shrugs and carries on outside. 

When I take him out his snap...a cup of tea and a bun we sit in the summer house. And he never actually looks wet...or even damp. There is a simple explanation for this which it took me years to fathom.  If he starts with several layers, he gradually abandons the top layer and just carries on.  Only the absolute worse weather puts him off.  And that’s only happened a couple of time in the last twenty years or so. 

But the problem is that he arrives at eight am....when I am often still in bed...so I get up! Every other Friday I am up dressed and moving by eight...at one stage he made sure I knew he was here by mowing the grass immediately outside my window. That worked! 

Now I don’t need reminders..and he knows it ....so as yet there have been no sounds coming from out there...but his car is parked...I’ve checked, so in the next hour I will make him his cuppa and put a bun on the tray whilst we sit in the summer house and he tells me all the village gossip for the week! 

The rain today is very light so he will be out there....doing something...getting a little damp is all part of the job it seems. 

When I first acquired a gardener it was by default. He was already David’s gardener. I used to get very cross when he pulled up the poppies and the other wild flowers...which he dismissed as weeds but that’s all gone now...I am not sure who has tamed who..I think it’s me but I’m sure he will think  the opposite. 

A weed he  tells me is anything growing in the wrong place!   I can’t argue with that but my garden was a field when I got it. For years it had had cows grazing on it.  They left it very fertile...it now has 72 trees and bushes in it plus a lawn the size of a football pitch. 

There’s a lot to do out there...I’ve been deadheading all week...

But there’s no sound of machinery so sometime soon I will make his cuppa and put it on a tray  complete with a bun.   Then we can sit in the summer house putting the world or rather the village to rights.....  it’s a hard life! 

1 comment:

UKViewer said...

Oh for a gardener like yours.

We have a tiny garden, dominated by the necessity to park our two cars there. So, side borders and hedges are prominent, which grow wild really, with minimum intervention, apart from our five cats digging and the occasional fox trying to dig under the fence to next door, who have a female dog, who is apparently not neutered and leaves her scent around their garden.

We have been trying to find someone to redo the garden for a couple of years, but they come, agree to give us a quote, and we hear nothing more. It seems that the job is either two big, or two small. We want a base for a shed further up the garden, a new shed and the current paving on the patio, taken up and relaid as it has settled and leaves rain puddles.

If your gardener is willing to transplant from Cornwall to a North Kent Suburb, there is a job here for him, as a one off