Who to blame

It is easy to talk about what others need to do; the most popular target of blame I find when listening to people is the local council. The council needs to do such a thing. I can’t believe the council hasn’t done anything about this or that. It’s as if the council is responsible for everything people pass in our towns, which the same people seem to get so much joy from taking objection to and pointing out if something is not up to their high standard of acceptance. The other classic is, if I had time, I would do it myself. This is by far my favourite saying, “if I had time”, oh how I love to ponder over hearing people use this simple phrase. If only you had time, the world would be a very different place to live. It’s fascinating how “if I had time” is some kind of hypnotic mind control suggestion that automatically makes people believe what they are saying is true.

Permaculture

In the world of permaculture, there is a principle of “observe and interact”; admittedly, this is my go-to principle, not just when I’m thinking about a permaculture design but in everyday life. Observation is a key skill to embrace daily and use; it will save so much of that most precious commodity called time.

Case in point, to get to my back garden without having to go through the house I need to walk around my neighbour’s house using a public road where there is a piece of land belonging to the council one would believe but when they come to cut the grass it always gets left so over the years it’s become a strip of land with an interesting look to it. For most of the day, it’s shaded by a wall, so it’s not a great place for anything to grow. This is probably why it’s become a place time forgot, and why it’s been left to its own devices. To add insult to injury, Yorkshire Water use this short stretch of road to access their reservoir, so each time their trucks return onto the main road from their private gravel road leading to the reservoir, gravel ends up on the public road, and over time, mixed in with driven-over tree branches, the road ends up in a right state. In short, this area is an eyesore, and rightly so, people just love to express their thoughts about how the council needs to do something about it.

Grumpiness

As much as it’s close to my house, I don’t really see this area very often, with it being hidden from my view. It’s certainly not part of my daily routine, passing by it like many people do each day. It’s the moans over it which bring it more to my attention. I’ll be mooching around in my garden when folks walking past stop to chat, and inevitably, the words council and do nothing end up getting spoken. I started weeding the public footpath that runs down past my garden towards town to stop people constantly moaning to me how “the council need to get down here and sort this snicket out, you can’t get past for the weeds” or words to that effect.

I do not clear the weeds down the snicket because I’m an upstanding member of the community, rather more to the effect that I’m just a grumpy sod who wants to relax in my garden reading a book without hearing people walking past moan to each other or to me about nettles or getting wet legs after raining due to all the weeds. All I want is the simple life. I get moaned at all week at work, but I get paid for that. Garden time is my time; life is too short for unpaid moans.

It was my grumpy thoughts that led me to step back and observe this small piece of land that is making so many people unhappy, and consequently, making me grumpier.

Wildflowers

The obvious solution was to sow wildflowers, after taking the whole section back to nothing but soil, which meant a few hours of weeding. The only question was around light levels with the strip of land hidden from the sun for most of the day, only really getting evening summer sun, not ideal when most plants are thinking about shutting down for the day when evening comes.

The light problem led me to source a particular British wildflower mix. Importantly, I did not want any grasses in the mix; grasses tend to take over and are often added to wildflower seed mixes to bulk them up. The other important consideration is that, to the untrained eye, when people see meadow grasses, they presume they are weeds, and weeds lead to moans and moans lead to me getting grumpy again. I know I’m a very selfish person, so it had to be a no-grass seed mix.  After taking more time researching wildflower seed mixes than I was intending, I went with a wildflower meadow mix focused on providing forage for bees and butterflies with around 21 different perennial flowers. Why spend so much time researching seeds, you may ask, when there are so many wildflower mixes available? It’s important to buy seeds from reputable UK companies that provide native wildflower seeds and not to buy imported wildflower seeds, which claim to be British. The company I went with is Damavand Pro Seeds, a DEFRA-registered company. Opting for such a varied seed mix would increase the odds of getting a dense enough show of flowers to cover the whole area, with the flowers that require the least amount of sunshine taking centre stage, getting a foothold and producing more seed for next year's succession to create an even denser covering of flowers.

Work begins

This spring, I headed out and set about weeding this strip of land. It’s not a vast area, but I soon had that sinking feeling as to why on earth I’m doing this when you suddenly realise something is going to take you much longer than you expect. Sadly, for some reason, I always seem to get this judgment of time wrong. Fortunately, I was only wrong by a couple of hours and not like with some of my other good ideas when I have been out by a magnitude of years. It also struck me that the soil was not in the quantity that I expected. After a little deliberation about what to do, I remembered noticing a small village of mole hills in a field up the road. Around sixteen large buckets later, the soil situation was solved.

Next came the sowing of the seeds, which again came with doubt after I’d sown the packet I had brought. According to the instructions of the coverage area, I had more than ample to cover this small space, but there is nothing like the never-enough mindset, where that inner voice is telling you something very different from the instructions on the packet. Content after sowing another same-sized packet of seeds the following day, that inner voice was quelled.

What a lovely dog

Now should be the time to sit back with excitement and await the joys of a new carpet of green life taking over the soil; instead, I found myself hitting my head against the wall. People are an interesting species, very unpredictable to say the least. In one breath, somebody was complimenting my hard work on how much better the area was looking after I had tidied it up, whilst letting their dog poo on the soil, followed by letting their dog scratch up the soil where the new shoots of the wildflowers had started to grow. Now I know I’ve already claimed to be grumpy, but is this normal behaviour whilst handing out praise with one hand, followed by hitting me in the nuts with the other? Later, I was also told how this little dog really enjoyed having his morning constitution on this lovely, tended soil and how he was most disconcerted when the flowers grew too tall for him to comfortably manoeuvre his bottom in this location. As you can imagine, I was devastated for him, poor little chap. The world is a very mad place at times.

With a little help with the watering from the lovely lady next door, and with no thanks to that sodding little dog, the seedlings became flowers in no time at all. I could now breathe again, and my anxiety levels would no longer spike when I spotted that blasted dog.

The issue of limited sunlight never really evolved into a visible issue for the wildflowers; this was perhaps due to sowing enough seeds to cover a football pitch on a few square meters of ground, allowing the less sunlight-loving flowers to fill the space. Never doubt that inner voice questioning the logic on the back of seed packets.

To conclude

In conclusion, the question is, did I have a peaceful summer in my garden away from moaning folks? Of course not, people just moaned about something else to me. At the same time, admittedly, it was rewarding to hear people comment on how lovely the flowers looked, if only they knew the full story.