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.
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