Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, how does your garden grow?

 

 

 

…with sticks and stones that break my... shovels… and my polar fleece is no longer white as snow…

...goes the classic nursery rhyme about two ignoramuses working in their garden.

While most of March was spent sitting in front of our computers (the Lord of the Manor had his exams, his Lady had an overload of work), our rare moments of repose were spent discovering our vast ignorance of the natural world.

Much like the early explorers, we spent many a long afternoon promenading around our new possession, pointing at creatures and objects saying, “What is it?” “Some kind of bush, I would say.” “No, indeed! I would say a tree.” “A tree, you say?” And we would survey the brown, stick-looking pointy things poking up out of the ground, and wring our hands. “Will we ever know?” And the conversation would invariably end with, “Mother-in-law will tell us.”

A Plant of Some Kind

We schemed and plotted to have Mother-in-Law and the Army of Aunts over for a party of tea and digging, in the hopes of solving the Mystery of the Unknown Sticks. Mother-in-law, for those who have not met her, is an all-knowing expert-of-the-garden, and does wonderful and magical things like turning seeds and soil into jam, and materialising magical stocks of sour cucumbers. Her verdict, however, was more elusive than elucidating – either, “It’s a type of bush of some sort,” or, “Well, let’s wait to see what grows on it” (interspersed with, “You really ought to cut these back,” or, “Don’t you want to clean out these dead leaves? Where’s your rake”)

And so we settled back to enjoy the early spring, content in the knowledge that by September, at the latest, we would be able to say with certainty if the small tree-like object in the middle of the lawn was in fact an apple tree, and if the twining leafy thingies under the deck were indeed roses.

 

With animal life we are no better. So far, I have identified from our rotating menagerie: a sparrow, an earthworm and a duck. There was a massive buzzing thing the size of my hand that burst in through the open back door, emitting a roar like a helicopter and sending me scuttling up the stairs to refuge which, when it stopped bashing itself against the window for a second, turned out to be a small, furry bumblebee. There was a small creature I unintentionally evicted from its burrow while digging in the compost heap which looked to my untrained eye like a mouse, but did not behave like one (do mice swim? Do they have black stripes down their back? Do they live in compost heaps?) There are the buzzing things which I identified as wasps but Piotrek assured me were “far too furry”. There is a whole organization of very busy birds criss-crossing our garden each morning, passing messages, checking this and that, holding meetings, of which I so far noted that some have blue feathers in their tails, and some do not. And there are the swarms of teeny-tiny insects that hover nebulously over one spot on the lawn every evening, which we currently name, “Dammit, I think these might be mosquitos… or are they too small?”

One thing we were able to do on our own was to identify the Things That May Be Alive and Things That Are Definitely Dead. And this is how we progressed toward our very first harvest: a harvest of sticks.



  We, in our growing wisdom, identified several items of our garden inventory – overlong strands of brown grass trampled flat, brittle twigs, tangled bits of overgrown bushes, broken branches clogging the little stream beyond our gate – as either candidates for relocation to the compost heap, or potential firewood. I with my secateurs and Piotrek with his axe set to work one sunny March Sunday, clearing out the messes of last year’s decorative hedges and ending up with heaps of kindling.

 

Our first harvest

 

The garden has turned out to be fairly addicting. We still have no clue what to plant, or where, or when, but there is always something to trim or tidy up. Piotrek has drawn an elaborate plan for our vegetable patch, which after a month of hard work with a pitchfork (several pitchforks, if we count the ones that were sent back to the store in disgrace with broken handles) has expanded to include all the components of a very yummy salad. And I have woken many mornings in the light of the every-earlier dawn to look out the window and find the Lord of the Manor, wrapped to the nostrils in a duffle coat and woolly scarf, hacking away at his squares of earth.

 

In no time at all, Piotrek has morphed into a hairy, sweaty, dirt-covered, pitchfork-wielding peasant: