Got rid of the guilt

Yep I made it down to the patch this afternoon. As you can see from the picture the light was failing by 3:30pm which is so demoralising as it feels very wintery. Things generally look OK my leeks are still there and won't be long until I pull them up. The ground was soft and sludgy which means it is easy to dig but my shoes became a pair of rather uncool mud platforms. Well I didn't get a lot of digging done (after a good deal of time spent distracted with other bits and pieces) but at least some digging is better than none.

I'm taking a leaf out of the Alys Fowler book who begins with discussing gardening on the slow track - now that's more like it - "dig a bit".

Alys does offer this up as the philosophy for life - to be part of the slow movement. I could definitely buy into it. What I can't do is "Once I stopped separating my work from my identity it all fell into place." Hmm. It's cool if your job is similar to your hobbies and you can slow it down or even mix the two. But I'm a wage slave and it is best that work does not leak into my home life as it could push out the fun things I like to do, and stress me out to boot. In fact work has affected my blog life recently, as you can see the drop in posts coincides with returning to work after maternity leave .Some times I have dreamt of improving work home balance with ideas of working for myself, working when I want to. However I've avoided the ideas of starting a business from say my photography hobby as I could end up hating photography - but Alys's approach where I just do some some slow photography could be tempting!

I was amazed today with how tidy some peoples patches are. Clear brown freshly dug earth, neatly stacked canes and planks, pruned plants, compost bins filled and covered - there is a high standard to aspire to on our site. Also security seems to have been stepped up with notices about locking up - pinned absolutely everywhere. Apparently we have had vandals as well as thieves it seems.

As for my plans:

• I must collect leaves before they have all gone as I would like to make leave mould (perhaps an after school activity for next week)

• Some more digging

• Prune the gooseberry bush its untidy and out of control (I better find out if I should do that now)

• Cover and mulch the area for the potatoes

• Oh and get those onions and broad beans in ASAP