I know I'm probably just coming down from the effects of the last few days of chicken related excitement (!), but today I'm feeling seriously underwhelmed with myself.
It hasn't helped I suppose that after a morning ticking irritating, mostly administrative chores off my to-do list (which should make me feel achieved, surely?) I spent the afternoon discovering how truly maddening and possibly pointless it is trying to weed out bluebells...
There are a number of places in the garden where these otherwise pretty and classic flowers are seeding themselves around to such an excessive extent that they are smothering out the other plants and generally not welcome - mainly the circle bed, the rose divider bed and the corner by the water tap which seems to have nothing surviving now except bluebells.
As we had begun last night the task of burying the lead out cable in trunking under the ground so the children don't trip over it, it seemed a good idea to make a start on weeding and tidying the rose divider border so that the trunking could also be dug in just along the back edge of the border soil on its route towards the chicken gate.... Seemed a straight forward enough task - admittedly quite a sizeable weeding job, coupled with a much needed bit of lawn edge neatening... which turned into a mammoth, frustrating, back breaking few hours in which I succeeded in clearing about a sixth of what actually needs to be done.
I was not assisted by the fact that the soil here is still really wet and claggy. And the fact that I have discovered that the bluebell bulbs are about a foot down at least. Even when well loosened by the garden fork, they also have the annoying tendency for the leaves to just come away, leaving the bulb still down there somewhere, to fight me another day/year/decade. And of course the border is also full of daffs and narcissi, which are practically indistinguishable when you're trying to dig bluebells out. Also I'm paranoid about upsetting the rose bush roots even though I probably won't like half the roses that are there, it still seems wanton violence to kill them at this point just before the flowering season when they could at least be judged on their merits! As if to drive the point home they kept stabbing me with their thorns whilst I struggled with their recalcitrant bed mates.
At this rate I am certainly not looking forward to this task in the circle bed, where they simply must come out or I won't have any room for my bee and bird plants and no colour after May!
To sum up how I feel now - incompetent, overwhelmed, useless.
I feel like I am struggling against an over-powerful tide to try and create something, anything in this garden that is me, mine, ours, rather than theirs. It doesn't help that grandma always seems to give the distinct impression that she is patiently waiting for me to fail - as she always knew I would.
And today I feel as if she is right.
I need a vision for what I want this place to become. A clear view ahead, so that even if it is many years away from being achieved (at least I learned that valuable lesson from the old house), on days like today at least I would be able to see that I might be inching towards it, have something to cling to. At the moment I am flailing about in the semi-dark, occasionally grabbing at passing glimpses of what I might want to do.
I am scared. It's such a big job. I'm scared of failing. I'm scared of not knowing what I want the end result to be. I need a clearer vision. But my head is spinning with stuff - I can't make coherent sense of it all right now.
How should I start? How should I stop myself from feeling this sense of being overwhelmed and incompetent?
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