Garden Disasters

I've had a few but these two were spectacular. A neighbour's tree fell over the fence and crashed into my arbour in the Potager. That was the first one. It required three of us to deal with and dispose of the tree, Then we had to ensure the passionflower sprawled over the arbor was intact enough to  raise up again. My friend who had a truck and  who was my source for transporting bamboo supplies from the hardware store no longer had a working truck, so my wheels spun while I tracked down a store that would deliver. A busy schedule delayed this even longer and then it became avoidance - I didn't want to to even look back there let alone start the huge effort of fixing it.

Eventually, months later, it got fixed although a section of one of the borders died off from being smothered. Now that the arbor is back up, I'm back out there again on a regular basis which has spurred yet more activity as I notice things and start moving things around. So in a way the destruction has triggered a new phase of regeneration.

Not quite the same outcome on the other side of the house where I had the bright idea to move my large water pot a few inches. And it moved much more easily than I thought it would, so I decided to move it a little more, which is when the hairline crack, the one that made it such a bargain in the first place, cracked until I was left holding a piece in my hand while the content of the pot flooded onto my sneakers. Oh wow there's a small family of frogs living in there.

Not much you can do with a broken pot, so I have it in the border with its broken part turned to face the fence. Now to find a solution on how to fill a broken container with no drainage but is missing half its back and can't really contain water.

And then there was the attempted break in this past weekend where the perpetrators used all kinds of things from the garden, like fence panels and mosquito screens to ward of my dogs and somehow barricade them on one side of the house while they tried unsuccessfully to enter on the other side. Not technically a disaster in the garden, but I now have to rethink everything about whats safe to leave outside while I'm not there. Garden tools, spades etc now have to be locked away.

To ease the pain, the weather has very kindly been raining almost every day so the garden looks healthy and after all the turbulence of carpentry and painting and moving and shifting we are back to cruising speed.