The edge of the lawn

The edge of the lawn is where the grass stops and the border begins.  As the  mild and sunny British spring weather continues I've become well acquainted with the edges of lawns, new and old.  Where time permits my husband mows, using our own petrol mower and I attempt the edging.  This task begins with a search of the customer's shed for the right tool.  Sheds are a fertile topic in their own right, but for the purposes of this post I will limit myself to the edging shears - if I can find them.  Are they stuck in that cardboard tube to my left?  No, those are our customer's late husband's golf clubs. Try again behind the forks and spades.  Finally unearth edging shears.  Success.  Open and close handles, inspect rusting blades and replace shears where I found them.

Another lawn, another shed.  I go straight to the allocated area and take out an almost new pair of hand shears, like shiny red gigantic scissors which rotate through 180 degrees.  Kneeling, I manicure the edges of the lawn.  A fiddly job but satisfying.  In other gardens, lacking such kit, I have been known to resort to a large pair of old kitchen scissors.  This is not ideal. 

A new customer and another set of shears.  Yes, there they are.  (I did not notice if there were any golf clubs).  What is more they are oiled and in good condition.  In a happy frame of mind I head towards the back patio to edge along the lawn only find grass has flowed from the lawns to the borders on my right and left.  These need digging out, weeding and redefining, but we are only being paid to mow the lawn.  Dispirited, I do what I can, replace the shears and take up a half moon.  Time is limited but at least I can try to restore some fragments of crazy paving.

At home in the garden

Gardening involves a lot of exercise.  Unpaid exercise can be a morning or an afternoon on the allotment:  kneeling to weed the strawberries, digging trenches to plant first early potatoes, raking to sow rocket and radishes, lifting the can to water the French beans that wait in the big greenhouse for the last frost to pass, bending to pick the loose leaf lettuce that M and I sowed in March.

Paid exercise is the mowing, weeding, pruning and tidying that we carry out for customers week by week. 

Recently I have noticed a strange but rather happy thing.  Each allotment begins to feel less like a vegetable plot and more like a back garden.  I suppose this could be attributable to our impending move to Lancashire at the end of the growing season.

However, as we work on the customers' lawns and borders the same feeling comes over me.  Perhaps this familiarity arises from repeated visits and established relationships.  I cannot describe it, all I know that is as I stand there I know that I am at home.  Gardening has become for me an exercise in integration.

Helping M on her first plot

On Saturday we accompanied M to a nearby site.  It's on a hillside with a park at the eastern boundary, a nature reserve at the northern end and the branch line to the south.  M wanted us to look at two plots that had become free.  We were impressed.  The site secretary let us in and showed us a very spacious 'hut' - ressembling a community lounge, with darts board and easy chairs; proper toilets and kitchen and a large tool store.  Then he took us up to the vacant plots.

The first one was nice and easy and it was obvious he was quite keen for M to take it.  M asked to see the second and fell in love with it.   We could understand why.  I counted the trees coming into blossom and the fruit bushes - a mature espaliered pear tree along the southern boundary, two apples along the eastern side, what looked like an apricot in the middle, a fig, another espaliered apple trained alongside what allotment holders euphemistically refer to as 'a temporary structure' , a young cherry tree, another apple hidden at one end of the temporary structure and a row of gooseberry bushes smothered in brambles. 

We returned to the amenity hut, had a nice cup of tea, M paid the deposit on the keys to the hut and locker room, signed the paperwork, memorised the combination on the gate.  After lunch we came back and slogged away for five hours.  At the end of that time we had strimmed the boundaries (by 'we' I mean my dear husband), uncovered a greenhouse base, emptied out sacks of old compost and horse manure, weeded around the cherry and filled two brown bins.  It was when I barked my hand on one of the concrete structures that I knew I had almost had enough.  We had cleared about one third. 

We sat on the four green plastic chairs we had salvaged and ate hot cross buns.   Then I untangled the fig from the brambles and pulled off all last year's small unripe fruit.

It was time to go home.  The hillside has some lovely views and a sharp wind.  M declined our supper invite.  She just wanted to sit in her own flat and count her blessings. 

Spring Salad Leaves

We have gone through a whole winter without recourse to any 'shop salads'.  By this I mean those plastic packets of leaves, probably puffed up with carbon dioxide, that go slimy in your fridge within a couple of days.  In contrast we have been picking our own mixed salads from the large greenhouse (thanks to a packet of seeds from my sister last autumn) which include Japanese mustard, rocket and several varieties of lettuce plus our home grown flat parsley.

Rocket will flower eventually - when in bloom it has a scent and slight ressemblance to wallflowers - so yesterday M and I uprooted some from the large greenhouse and planted red oak-leaved lettuce in its stead.  The lettuce seeds were a freebie in the RHS magazine and it is a month since we first sowed them in small pots. 

Prior to this, M was, as is her custom on 'snail patrol'  throwing as many as she could out of the door. 

Later today I will go down to make sure that our little lettuces have withtstood the depredations of any spare molluscs and are standing up.