Spring Cheer in the Garden

A bit of actual spring cheer

The soil in the garden here is dreadful. It's heavy on clay, in other words pure mud when wet and rock hard when dry. It screams for compost or any improvement really and all flower and vegetable beds are exposed soil, and so is the ground around the fruit trees. I have nothing against digging my fingers into good, soft top soil, but the muddy sludge that is wet claysoil is not much short of disgusting. This of course means a few things. One, the immediate emergency solution is to bring in as much new soil as I can and use that for whatever I want to plant. Two, I must get a proper compost going post haste, along with a wood chipper so I can start working on both improving the soil itself and covering its surface up with protective material. So far the owner of the house (grandma-in-common-law) has been of the persuasion that exposed soil is "tidy" and that any plant matter cover is not, so theoretically there might be some resistance to my plans, however I suspect that will be shortlived.


I of course knew beforehand that the soil was dreadful, but the knowledge became concrete only just now, as I spent a short while planting some early coriander seeds in a flower bed. Incidentally that seems to be another thing the old lady doesn't subscribe to, having edible plants amidst decorative ones, especially if they're not in nice straight rows. Usually I rather enjoy the process of sowing, but now I found myself not really wanting to touch the ground with my bare hands at all. It really made abundantly clear how desperately the garden needs to be worked on, and how I really can not put it off, especially since I would like to redo the garden quite thoroughly. But even if I wanted to eschew large scale changes, I would still need to put in quite a bit of work if I wanted to get half decent results.

I also spent some time dredging the garden pond, which is small, shallow and filled with many years' worth of gunk. Quite apart from the near solid, porridge like cover of algae on the surface, I dredged up a bucketful of semi rotten leaves, some slimy water plants and a stench familiar to those who have made their acquintance with fetid swamp waters.
Had I not spied what seemed to be the emerging buds of water lilies, I might have been overcome with desire to fill the damn thing up for good. As it is, the optimist -or delusional- section of my persona insists it must be possible for a garden pond to not stink, not be covered in algae and in general to be rather pretty and pleasant than a practical study in swamp gas productions.