Dug Me A Hole
A few months ago, while still unemployed, I decided to convert a particularly productive weed-growing section of lawn into a vegetable garden.
My flatmate and I dug a pretty serious hole out of what turned out to be, after about five centimetres of topsoil, iron-hard clay. We collected this into great piles on either side of our hole, planning to fill it in with some compost in a week or so.
Unfortunately for my gardening ambitions, I got a job. This led more or less directly to my not touching the garden or indeed doing anything even remotely linked to gardening, like mowing the lawn, for three months. Skip to the present: the lawn is waist high and small birds are nesting in the dandelions. Clearly, it was time for me to take action.
My girlfriend’s dad arrived around 11 AM armed with a weed-whacker. A lawn-mower simply wouldn’t have managed it, unless it had the All Blacks pushing. I’d gotten out of bed on a Sunday at the ridiculous hour of 10:30 AM to pull the dandelions and evict the finches. Turns out dandelions are covered with thorn-things full of a kind of venom. Who knew? After ridding the lawn of the things, my hands were red and throbbing.
After my girlfriend’s dad had whacked the weeds, I went out to survey things and thought of the abandoned garden. After thrashing around for a while I found it buried in some serious weeds. I got on a bit of a bender, and after ripping up more inexplicably poisonous dandelions and some broad-leafed things whose roots apparently have the ability to synthesise titanium alloys, I fetched tools from the garage and started moving dirt around.
During the winter months I’d kept a compost bin, by which I mean I threw decomposable things into a bucket under the sink and emptied it whenever I remembered it was there, which was never. It was only when it began to leach odd fluids and make a really rich and varied stench that my flatmates revolted and told me to get rid of the bloody thing. I got maybe three loads of compost into a construction of bricks by the garden that I think might have begun life as a barbeque before quitting.
Happily, this muck had blended nicely with some lawn clippings I’d chucked on in the lawn’s last treatment before winter, and had actually formed compost. I shovelled this into the hole in the lawn and, after a bit more weed-clearing, spread piles of clay-dirt all over it.
I have yet to actually plant anything, and I’ll probably have to write to my grandparents to find out how this side of things actually works, but I do now have a satisfyingly blank bit of dirt in the lawn the approximate size and shape of a grave. I hope the neighbors are suspicious.
