The Overly Enthusiastic Gardener

Now, just so we’re perfectly clear about this – I don’t like gardening.

About six years ago, while making a few other earth-shattering decisions, we decided to sort out our yard/lawn/gardens. We’ve never been particularly keen on gardening (well, me anyway) – Denise likes growing vegies – but when you’ve got your own home there seems to be an expectation that you’ll establish and maintain gardens of some sort. Or is that just me and one of my twisted views of life?

Every place we’ve lived there’s always been a problem area somewhere in the garden, and over the years we’ve become pretty adept at ignoring them. But now, our problem area is right at the bottom of our back steps, so we needed to sort it out. 

The house we live in was built in 1911 and had a little shed in the garden, outside the “mud room”. This was the original laundry and was still standing (just) when we bought the place. Behind this is the “trap shed” – now Man Cave – and the area between was just an overgrown mess. We had a couple of half-hearted attempts to clean this up, but when we found a treasure trove of buried ceramics, crockery, glass and general rubbish we decided it was too hard, so we lived with it for a few years.

Then the shed collapsed.

What now??

Better get rid of the remains. All this did was expose more treasure, and opened up the whole mess so it was easier to see from the house.

Great!!

Time to get serious. It’s now 2013 and we’ve decided to sort all the gardens and lawns out once and for all.

  

How?

  

Hire someone to do it for us.

It's amazing how quickly you can make a mess with a little digger.

So, after a lot of “discussion”, mind-changing, wine, chocolate, and about five years, we ended up with…

Then cancer paid us a visit.

Right… Need to make plans, ‘cause we’re gonna be in Auckland for a few weeks and we won’t be wanting to worry about the gardens for awhile after that.

Let’s hire a gardener.

So, he turned up a couple of weeks before we had to go to Auckland and got stuck straight in. We were keeping an eye on what he was up to and everything was great. So, off we went to Auckland…

And came back to this…

Can you see the Orangeberries, and the Daffodils,
and the Thyme, and the Raspberries?

Weellll…. We laughed, and laughed, and laughed… so much!!!

And now the weeds are back.

Here’s a question for you? Should we start again? Or should we cement the whole area and make it into a little Italian style grotto?

Remember, I don’t like gardening.

No. We didn’t, and no we won’t, fire the gardener.