One morning, early in 2012, my then husband asked me whether I could be happy without a garden. I said I didn’t think so. By the beginning of May that year he had left – he moved in to a rented house in Cornwall that (somewhat ironically) has a garden. In the intervening four years, I have actually never been without a garden, although when I was a student in Kent I was a long way away from it. But I never felt like gardening, which amounts to the same thing.
Last spring, when Ryan and I started work on our new garden, I felt a resurgence of my gardening mojo, but it died a death as the process of creation wore on. There was plenty of work to be done in the garden, but there was nowhere to do any real gardening. I couldn’t play with my plants, I could only keep them alive, moving them from pillar to post as they were increasingly in the way.
With the wet start to this year, it felt like we would never get out there and get anything done, but last weekend we finished building the raised beds. There’s still plenty of work to be done outside, but it suddenly felt as though we’d broken the back of it. It has taken a long time, and it has been hard work, and I am grateful to Ryan and his dad for their tireless help.
This garden is designed to weather the ups and downs of life, even when I don’t. Gardening in raised beds concentrates the gardener’s effort where it’s most needed. There won’t be a lot of weeding to do, and the deep beds means the plants in them won’t need watering as often. If life outside the garden prevents me from spending enough time in it, then I can ‘close down’ some of the raised beds – planting them with low maintenance flowers for a season, seeding them with green manures or simply covering them in plastic
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