On the weekend I started on my annual backyard weeding while the sun beamed down on me and spent a couple of hours clearing a portion of the garden and marvelling at the blackberries.
Tonight, after a banana and blackberry smoothie, I spent a further hour at it, quite comforted by the overcast cooler weather and a little bewildered about digging up weeds at 9.30 in the evening. I’m still not used to the late sunsets and early sunrises.
Last year was a very different garden cleansing task as it was my first summer in this house and the weeds covered the whole area. I dug up everything and planted grass and left a patch for doing vegetables. The vegetable patch never became a reality and over the following months the weeds took over.
This year, although the garden looked quite horrific, I’ve found that underneath the vines and weeds and thorns, the grass is still somewhat there despite not being exactly the greenest kind (more a drabby straw colour).
The infestation of mint was less than last year but it provides a nice refreshing scent to the air while digging out clumps of greenery.
Last year, potatoes turned up all over the backyard but this year I hadn’t bumped in to any until tonight. We have a patch of concrete at the rear of the garden which backs on to the backyard of another house. I know that our raspberries (and more than likely the blackberries) turned up through things crawling under and over and through the fence. At the bottom of the fence where the concrete ends is a small 15cm gap of soil and that’s where the potato plants were. I dug up about 10 good sized potatoes and a dozen smaller one.
I’m more keen than ever now to get the vegetable patch going. I want carrots and peas and tomatoes, maybe some broccoli or cauliflower if they’re not too difficult, along with, of course, the potatoes and berries. And I’ll need a little net construction to keep out the birds and the cats. But I’m sure it’s possible.
Growing vegetables and berries reminds me a lot of my childhood in Finland when we had all sorts of things growing in our backyard to munch on in the summer, and spending days helping out at my grandparents’ farm. Loovely.