The arrival of June brought sunshine, heavy rainfall and longer daylight hours so we now have a garden full of turbo-boosted plants, weeds and slugs. There is no time to linger and admire the roses. We have work to do. Doc cannot keep up with grass cutting and I have doubled my efforts tending the vegetable beds.
I need to be in several places at once and the garden is very large. My continuing foot pain means I can no longer run hither and thither fetching this, that and the other so I carry a basic tool kit with me at all times. This standard tool kit comprises of a large trug with handles, a bucket for the weeds, a kneeling mat, secateurs, a standard trowel, twine and scissors. Optional items are a wheelbarrow, hoe and a chemical killer - the latter being the only weapon against our ground elder and bindweed.
My insistence in having this particular kit with me may imply that I am a fastidious gardener and take care of my tools. However, nothing is further than the truth. I take no special interest or pleasure in any item of gardening equipment. As long as a tool does the job, that is fine by me. I have never sharpened a hoe or secateurs in my life and the pair of scissors lost their edge years ago. (In fact it is often quicker to use my teeth to sever a length of twine.)
My father used to tut tut at my laziness but he invested so much time and effort in conditioning his tools that there was no time to do any actual gardening. In any case doing any hoeing would spoil the hoe. I know that as such a keen gardener I should be ashamed of my bad habits but I am not. I don’t want to take out a largish mortgage to buy the classiest, sharpest pair of secateurs on the market and lovingly oil them after every use. There is a lot to do in this gardening life and I don’t want to waste time polishing anything. It sounds too much like outdoor housework. There are cheap and cheerful tools at the garden centre which I can mistreat for a couple of years and then replace.
Maybe I would value my tools more if there wasn’t the constant threat of misplacing them on such a large the plot. The kneeling mat disappeared for weeks so I used a rolled up old cardigan until I found the proper one under the Acer tree. Doc found one of our many trowels – the black one with the rattly handle - in the compost bin and it was still in perfect condition despite languishing there for a year.
I used to wish manufacturers would produce their wares in bright colours so they are easier to spot a few hundred feet from the shed. They must have heard me muttering because girly peptobismol –pink is very trendy at the moment. I have invested in a new set of yukky coloured tools and so far nothing has walked. Neither does Doc snaffle any of them either. Although he fully supports equal opportunities, apparently he couldn’t bear to be seen using a pink trowel.....
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