Gardening with my subconscious

I was putting some daffodil bulbs in the front garden when a light bulb went off in my brain. My onion sets are bulbs, I should probably be planting them at this time of year, not in the spring like my other veg.

So I looked on the packet I bought from Wilkinson's a few weeks back, and sure enough it said the last month for planting them was December. Good thinking, brain!
My brain also had plans for where they should go. I thought about how much trouble my back's been lately and how much work major changes to the layout to the garden were going to be, and came to the conclusion that getting rid of the existing shrubs was quite enough work for this year, so I needed to work with what was already there. My first thought was I'd put them where I'd just taken the small bush out:

In fact, my brain went so far as to refuse to consider any other options for them. It didn't even occur to me that there were other ready-to-plant areas in the garden until my other half came out after lunch to see what I was up to and mentioned he was glad I wasn't planting in the vegetable patch at the back of the garden, as that was going to get all trampled up when the cupboards for the new kitchen were brought in through the new garden gate next week.
Possibly that was just forgetfulness, possibly it was my subconscious doing the thinking for me so my conscious brain doesn't have to. I'm going to choose to go with the latter.
Anyhow, I decided that my subconscious could also decide how I was going to plant the mixed assortment of onions (red, white and yellow). I thought up a couple of possibilities and then asked myself if I'd feel disappointed with my choice if I took that option. In the end I decided to plant them in diagonals of red, white and yellow (from left to right) when that scheme made me positively glow with contentment.

I'm hoping they're going to look like ornamental alliums planted in drifts.
After I'd planted them I remembered that I was supposed to be adding organic matter, I also remembered that my veg growing class told us that compost will work its way into soil if just dumped on the top of it and I also remembered I really want to avoid digging because it messes my back up, so I just shovelled some on top.

Well, I say shovelled, transporting compost from one end of the garden forkful by forkful is a bit of a pain, so I emptied out a large flowerpot to use to bring it and discovered another huge colony of snails.

I didn't think a single garden could support so many snails. I disposed of them the organic way (water and washing-up liquid).

About half an hour of gardening

I decided my back problems were well enough to take this bush out (I think it's probably a hebe). Today's back problems all feel mouse-related, so I figured doing this gardening would actually positively do me good, and so far I seem to have been right, cutting branches off bushes with secateurs doesn't cause me the same problems as digging.

But I decided to learn from my experiences on the weekend, so I only cut and sawed the branches off in large sections and left the job of cutting them up small for the compost heap for another day.

I also left quite a bit of the core of the bush where it was. Another job for another day.

Garden finds

These are all the balls I've found in the garden so far. Four of them were in the bush I just took out.

I don't know what the plant in the photo is, but it's pleasant looking during the summer and has gorgeous autumn colours, so it's earned its reprieve and gets to stay until I find something I positively want to replace it with (although I might try pruning it back a bit, as it's bigger than I'd like).

Give it some wellie!

I got some new wellies from the Internet.

My feet are size 9 (that's 11 in US sizes or 42 in Europe), so my choices were limited because most places in the UK only go up to size 7 or 8 for women's shoes. But I found these pretty ones with daisies all over them, and I'm pretty happy with them - although I did have to roll my trousers up, as I couldn't get all of my calves, my leg warmers and my trouser legs in the legs.

How much gardening is too much for chronic pain?

I did two things in the garden today. The first one was that I clipped one of the box trees in the front garden. That's the clippings you can see in my upside-down compost bin. The compost bin is currently upside down because it got moved out of the way like that when our fence was replaced. In an ideal world, I wouldn't have just tossed them on the top of the bin and left them there, I'd have mixed them in with the rest of the bin's contents. Unfortunately, between clipping the hedge and clearing up the clippings, I did one other thing in the garden:

I re-dug the vegetable patch because it had been flattened when the fence was put up. I didn't even do a particularly good job of it. I left most of the chunks of earth large and unbroken and it only took me about 5 to 10 minutes - or at least, that was my perception (time does fly when I'm gardening). But by about three quarters of the way through, my lower back was using twinges to tell me it wasn't happy. I should probably have stopped the moment it started to hurt, but I really wanted to finish what I'd started - also, I have no guarantee that the damage wasn't already done at that point and that I'd have any fewer twinges bending down afterwards or would heal quicker if I stopped the moment the trouble started. Also, I really didn't want to leave clippings all over the front garden for yet another day, so I carried on and cleared those up.
My desire not to leave things unfinished so I don't have to do them later is clearly higher than my desire to look after my chronic pain.
It's tricky though. Mindfulness meditation suggests that I should be kind to myself. But what is kind to myself? Is it kind to myself to stop doing something the moment it starts hurting? If so, I wouldn't work at all (mind you, I'd have no issue with that if I had the money not to work). Or is it kind to myself (my usual approach) to make sure future Laura has an easier life because present Laura has thoughtfully planned and done things for her? I often find myself pleasantly surprised to discover that past Laura had done things for future Laura, that present Laura had forgotten all about and is now benefiting from, and it comes as a pleasant surprise to discover how organised and thoughtful I was (that particularly applies to filing things properly when I get them).
Of course, the downside of this is it means I have a tendency to battle on through pain - for instance I continue to work and save for my pension and my future despite the fact that, as a rough rule of thumb, every minute I spend working adds to my pain (it doesn't necessarily increase it up and up, but it does cause me repeated pain which I wouldn't necessarily be in otherwise and which stays with me and causes me problems after I've finished). It also means that I look like I cope brilliantly - or possibly that there's very little for me to cope with in the first place, which often means I end up doing more and more, including things I probably really shouldn't be, like the washing up (that causes me a lot of problems).
Anyhow, the key point is that I gardened until about quarter or an hour beyond the point at which it started hurting, and that's very definitely me done gardening at least for the day and quite possibly for the weekend, or even the week. There's another bush I'd have liked to take down:

It's not happening today though.
So, how much gardening is too much? I've been thinking about it while I was writing this, and I've come to the conclusion that for me it's like this:

Know your chronic pain. Observe what happens to your body when you do things. Then make choices about what trade-offs are worth it to you. Also, if you can split a job up so you do a bit of one physical activity for a while followed by a bit of a different one, that helps. For instance, if you need to spend an hour weeding, an hour mowing the lawn and an hour clipping bushes, it can help to do 30 minutes of weeding, followed by 30 minutes of mowing, followed by 30 minutes of clipping, then start the cycle again (or 15 minutes or 10 or even 5 if that's how your back works and you can bear to switch tasks every five minutes). I've now discovered that even 5 - 10 minutes is too much digging for me at the moment (although I have joined the gym, so if I'm lucky, that may change as my body gets stronger). In retrospect, I should have started with a couple of minutes of digging and interspersed my digging with clipping (which I can do for quite a long time without pain). But it didn't occur to me that I wanted to dig until I'd pretty much finished clipping. Also, I had no idea that 5 - 10 minutes was too much. Then, on top of that, I like starting gardening without thoroughly planning everything I'm going to do. I also like concentrating on a single task for longish periods, so constantly switching is quite irritating for me. On the other hand, perhaps switching about would have kept me going longer, which would have been good for my goal of doing more gardening than I got through today, but might also have upped my irritation levels (having to switch about instead of doing it in my preferred style). 

Update from the following day (Sunday): I should have stopped earlier. I should have done no more than 2 minutes of digging. I'm still in a lot of pain (in different places from where I had the problems yesterday), and digging the veg patch wasn't worth it. I will try and remember to limit myself to two minutes a day when I get better again (possibly with an alarm, so I don't just keep going). How I feel today was not worth 10 minutes of digging.

New fences all finished

Fences down, trees gone

We had the fence people in today to give us new fences and rip out our trees. Turns out trees are quite bulky. They took away this much:

Afterwards, the garden looked like this:

Back of the envelope design for the garden

I've been thinking about how the garden needs to work for me and started sketching things out on scraps of paper. I need to do more work on a couple of fronts (firstly, precise lengths and secondly making sure I've thought of all the plants and infrastructure I'm going to want, particularly plants). What I've taken into account so far is that I need somewhere to hang the washing out on the washing line (which lives in the shed for aesethetic reasons and to stop it getting dirty when not in use). I've thought long and hard about it, and I also think I need grass or grass-like plants under the washing line so that when I drop washing on the ground it doesn't automatically need to go through the wash again. Secondly, I want raised beds for my crop rotation. What I haven't yet worked out is where I should have my perennials, shrubs and trees (fruit bushes and trees, asparagus etc.) and whether they can go at the ends of my crop rotation beds or if I need something separate for them. So, here's the preliminary plan:

The two big squares at the front of the plan represent the shed plus the space next to it. The round space in the middle is where I'm going to have the washing line with camomile and other grass-replacement plants under it. The bits around it are my raised beds and then the strip right at the top is my existing concrete strip right by the house. This doesn't take full account of the existing infrastructure, which includes a concrete path I'd like taken out. It also assumes it's always going to be OK to walk on my lawn to get to the shed or the back of the garden, whereas I might instead need some sort of path or stepping stones.
Here's the garden as it currently is (also back of the envelope stuff):

The next stage is to draw the existing garden in Sketchup and then use that to draw more designs.