Grow your own

Every muscle, every fibre of my being is screaming out in agony. If you listen carefully, you can probably hear them. It’s not as bad as Sicky Dion, but it’s still definitely not a pleasant sound – especially if it’s coming from within you.

The reason for that screaming is the new vegetable patch that I installed chez 6000 this morning. As you can see from the photos below, before work began, the area in question was covered with mutant, cyborg ivy.
Oh yes, it might just look like ordinary ivy to the untrained eye, but having gone in there armed with only a spade and a massive flamethrower, I can assure you there there was something distinctly “otherworldly” about that stuff: for a start, normal earth ivy doesn’t have tungsten roots, does it?

Before, during and after.

And that’s the reason I now sit here with a nice Marlon (for medicinal purposes) and a dread of what fresh pain tomorrow morning will bring. On the up side, we are now growing spinach, beetroot, baby cabbage and… something else which escapes my memory (Eggplant?).

The kids like it, I like it and next door’s cat (a big fan of digging stuff up in our other veggie patch) has already put in an appearance, which I enjoyably curtailed with a handful of gravel.

And then – a little later this evening: this.