Uphill gardening (snigger)

I'm hoping I might be able to get out into the garden tonight.

I won't achieve it. I know that for a fact. There is something with the train managers on a Thursday which means my first train of an evening runs late, making me miss my second, hang around in Leicester for 40 minutes and end up buying a bottle of wine. I am already prepared for this - I have come to work with my plastic wine glass all ready.

This all gets me home late and, on a Thursday, I can't be bothered. I just want to get straight on with cooking my dinner and the rest of the wine. But I am hopeful.

I do enjoy gardening. Whilst previously I have cogitated about buying my house and whether or not it was the right thing to do at the time; were I to buy anywhere it would have had to have a garden. I looked around quite a few maisonette flats in one particular area and the garden - if you even got a garden - was tiny, pokey, unworkable and quite often shared between yourself, the neighbour and the chap upstairs.

No, if I had rented somewhere the absence of the garden would have been a blow, but one parried to a great extent by the flexibility of a lease. But I do enjoy my garden.

This being me, I am not your usual type of garden. I don't know the names of things. I know names such as 'apple', 'grass' and 'potato' but that is it. And also, this being me, I only put into the garden when I can get something out of it. So the front garden is all nice and pretty in order to give a good impression and hopefully bump up a) the social standing of the house and the area; and (and also doubley therefore) b) the house price. So my bush is always very neatly trimmed in case I should get an unexpected visitor and by back passage kept nice and clear and all the wee beasties are eradicated.

The back, however, is purely productive. I have trees which grow apples and pears and plums and cherries; bushes with raspberries and strawberries and blueberries; and I have asparagus spears and grape vines. Then this year I have, for the third year running, planted potatoes which are doing very well; started off tomatoes and peppers; and grown peas and carrots and beetroot and parsnips. I also have a bed of lettuce. The fruits of my labour (yes, intended) pay off sufficiently that I don't have to buy fresh produce for a substantial quantity of the year. Even better, this year I have my very first batch of pear cider.

This has turned me into an accidental environmentalist as I now compost everything that can be composted to provide me with cheap compost and space in my wheeliebin for all the other rubble. And obviously it will have saved me food miles (whatever they are) as well as doing my bit as an urban garden sink. Or whatever. You can tell I'm only into the 'green' ethic when it actually has some benefit to me.

I have been very lucky in that the garden was very well established when I first arrived - the hedges are all very much in the same state as they were, and the trees already a good decade old or so, hardly requiring any pruning or arboriculture of any sort. And the front hasn't had to have a vast quantity to do it other than regular weeding, although I have tackled one area per year - last year it was the border down the side next to the neighbour which now looks very pretty having been a bit of an overgrown shambles before. I also managed to empty out the front border which is invisible to people from the street, hidden by the hedge as it is, but annoyingly very visible from the bedroom window. I still haven't done much with that area - being in the shade of the hedge there is not much which will grow there. I may just extend the lawn.

My current project out the front is an area I call Centre Point. For those of you not aware, this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek reference to the rather ugly yet very usefully gigantic 1960s tower block at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street in London. My Centre Point is an area of nothingness. Where my path at the front divides, sending one branch to the front door and the other up my back passage, there is nestled in the corner this patch, borded by the path on two corners, and the front lawn on the other two. Unfortunately somewhere within there is a manhole, so the area needs to be accessible and cannot simply be grassed. But it used to have an ancient pair of rosebushes ruling over a mass of allsorts of whatever plants, running amok and generally looking more dishevelled that I manage to look on a Friday night.

So this is my current task - to entirely clear the area (not just weed it, but get everything out) and then plant in there some nice bushes with some lovely red, white and blue flowers (for this is the colour scheme out the front). I am getting there slowly, although again my galavanting does somewhat delay this further.

Who knows, by the end of summer I may have more bush round the front to keep trim and tidy.