Garden: Playing Painful Catch-up

I decided to try and potter in the garden today, inspired by my long-suffering other half who is currently building me some large compost bins and also adding some timber to the downhill slope of a couple of the vegetable beds in the potager.  Yesterday he wheeled a barrow load of compost down from the compost zone to the beds and it was so dark luscious and, OK, rather twiggy, that I was encouraged to clear weeds and get ready for a deep mulch of this stuff.

 I can get very excited by compost!

Which was rather optimistic on several levels.  I have enough homemade compost to mulch an area of perhaps 4m x 1.5m, or in other words two thirds of one bed.  I have at least 6 that would benefit from the treatment this year.

Secondly also rather optimistic, given that I currently have a build up of fluid and very painful inflammation - due to the Lyme disease or a complication is yet to be established - in one knee, both elbows, one wrist and most painful of all one shoulder.  That doesn't leave many limbs available for turning and weeding heavy wet clay.  Of course the heavy and wet part of the story is the main reason for getting the compost onto the beds.

I am, perhaps foolishly, working through the pain right now.  Paracetamol just doesn't touch it and codeine, as well as making me dopey and uncoordinated, stops my digestive system dead in its tracks.  There is a limit to how long you can add food into the top without ...  Well, you get the picture, I'm sure.

This bed had potatoes and chillies last year, this year it will be broad beans and early peas, and probably the first batch of haricot, and then will be followed up by summer cabbages and other early brassicas.  It is very wet and boggy despite being on a slope, and full of slugs.  Only one glowworm larvae so far this year - it is going to get very fat!

I decided to tackle the quick (please!) job of lifting and chopping the weeds from bed number seven before covering it in a cardboard mulch.  After an hour I'd completed about a metre length of the bed, one side only and my muscles were all a quiver!  Thank goodness it was lunch time!  Given that since October all I've done is weed and mulch five fruit bushes, I think did rather well.  At this rate I should be ready to plant in about 2016!

The compost area is right at the top of the plot, a good thirty metres from the veg garden simply because it is such a slug breeding ground I wanted to keep it as far from the veg plot as possible.  The daleks have always been pretty rubbish, even after I removed the bases and the tops.  They will be used for leaves in future.  Although gathering leaves was another ob that just didn't happen this autumn.

Early stages.  The timber is reused shuttering from concreting the drive.