Green Fingers

I am not Alan Titchmarsh. In some respects this is a blessed relief but, if I was, our garden would not be sporting the council estate chic that it currently has. The shed is looking shabby, the weeds are bursting their way up through the crooked patio slabs, and all the plants that we wanted to come into bloom and bring fragrance and light into our lives have all given up the ghost and died. It has become a home for discarded pots, gates and, for some reason, a tyre. 

To be honest the tyre should have been discarded a while ago but if my memory serves me correctly the present Mrs Hayward had some creative idea that she could transform the discarded tyre from a Vauxhall Corsa into a decorative plant pot. I was less than convinced that she could pull this off and subjected her idea to derision and ridicule. Not being one to be put off by my opinions I guess she eventually came to the same conclusion and the tyre now lives, unloved and unpainted, beside the shed. 

Thankfully we never embarked upon Mrs Hayward’s other creative idea, to turn an old toilet pan into a novelty flower pot. Again, I pooh-poohed the idea (if you’ll excuse me) as I didn’t see the attraction in trying to entertain guests at a barbecue whilst sat next to an old Armitage Shanks loo. Even with the prospect of Begonias bursting forth from it, for me it didn’t shout sophisticated or charming. Perhaps I’m a Philistine and my wife is a visionary. Time will tell.

Mrs Hayward’s solution to our troublesome garden is to patio it over, but properly, with no scope for weeds to appear. However with a tight budget of minus nothing this isn’t practical but inspired by our new neighbours (on the unattached side) we have decided to press on with a solution. Grass. Yes, grass is the future. OK, so it was my idea all along but if you leave an idea long enough to germinate in Mrs Hayward’s mind she eventually comes around to my way of thinking. It’s like Sky+ and smart phones, despite initial resistance she eventually concedes that I am right. 

OK, I’m pushing my luck here as she won’t agree with that point of view at all, and she is also reminding me at every turn that the grass is a “temporary measure”, just “for a couple of years” until she comes in with a load of slabs and a cement mixer and patios over the lot, but we’ll see. 

So, over the next couple of weekends the old cracked slabs will disappear and a new lush lawn will spring up. Which is a good idea in principle but I am not built for manual labour and I know that three slabs in I will be wishing I’d not started such a painstaking endeavour. I’m looking forward to driving the slab laden van to the skip but the rest of it is a bit of a pain and all the time I will be dreaming of a cool beer in a pub garden. 

I have to keep reminding myself that without pain there is no gain and so I will persevere. We are using grass seed so there’s a bit of prep work involved although the Homebase website has been very useful in this respect. I may even use the Elephant poo I got for Christmas as a fertiliser.

Of course once you start you begin to get ideas. The shed’s days are numbered as we intend to downsize to something more compact and sporty, and we really need to put a fence up at the end of the garden as the current wall is too short. Oh, and then there’s the ugly planter. We’ve never really known what to do with that but are loathe to remove it as we suspect it’s holding up the wall between us and our neighbours (on the attached side). With a bit of time and money I would take the whole lot down and get a higher wall or fence erected, mainly so that our neighbour doesn’t hang over it and try to talk to us, like an older and slightly more inebriated version of Chad. 

He’s a nice guy I’m sure but too many times we’ve been caught up in one of his never-ending and slow moving conversations. He will start the chat but never formally end it. He just stops talking and stares at us until his wife comes out to get him or we fake sudden illness. I’ve even been known to drop to the ground and crawl on my belly to the back door so as not to be spotted when he’s in his garden. 

Seriously, ask Mrs Hayward, I’m not even joking. I was helping her put the washing out once when in mid-conversation she turned round to find I had disappeared from view. She eventually spotted me face down on the ground, dragging myself back to safety by my fingernails.

So whatever you do over the next couple of weekends, please spare a thought for me, trying to force myself to be practical and manly when I would rather be standing on the side providing moral support and encouraging words or being pushed about in the wheelbarrow.

Mind you, when it’s done, you can come round for a barbecue.