As you can see, a very ordinary, small, town garden. And an axe. Which I got for Christmas, and which I had to use to hack through thick, buried wisteria vine running under the western bed.
I got paid last week. I discovered a few months back that buying dormant fruit trees at this time of year is surprisingly cheap. So I have some apple trees incoming, ones that I can raise in containers. I’ve slowly been building a small stock of fruit trees, even as I raise other plants from seed. The soil is fucked. There’s no drainage, either. And, as my daughter’s partner pointed out, there is probably more salt in the air from the Thames Estuary than I, as a lifelong resident, actually notice. I’ve been amending the soil at the back western corner, behind the axe there, to start a pollinator/wildlife-highway section, and I’ll have to do something similar at the front end. I am determined that by summer this garden will be producing food.
I once read an interview with Jon J Muth where he talked about having his and his friends’ kids cover a wall with random messy marks, which he then considered the under-painting for a new mural, taking inspiration from the marks he had to work with. I consider my long-neglected garden in a similar way.
(Apparently I wrote this on Jan 30 and never posted it)