February 2024

Practising what I preach? - hmm

It is time for me to practise what I preach - ahh. So easy to dish out the very sensible, knowledgeable, worthy advice - but now I need to show I can follow it too!

So how has this happened? Well, I have just taken on a house and garden. I say garden and I believe there is one in there somewhere, but currently its main feature is a ginormous area of brambles with stalks as thick as a big toe and root balls a the size of a small football. “Will you use poison?” I am asked - but, tempting though it is - my instinct screams out against doing this. In trying to attune more to nature and live a more spirit-led life, treating weeds with poison doesn’t sit well with me, and so it will be the spade, secateurs (probably loppers more like) and sheer hard work. Which takes us back to the first sentence in this blog - ‘….practice what I preach….’. I advise my gardening patients “Don’t spend more than 30 - 45 minutes on any one type of task. “You need to make sure you change the way your body is being used so you can rest the muscle groups you have been using and give them recovery time.” Hmmm - obviously easier said than done, I think, as I contemplate the enormity of the task ahead of me. I want to get stuck in and get the job done. I want those brambles gone, so I can uncover the garden beneath and start to draw out the beautiful space I envisage - and I want it done yesterday. Patience is a virtue, we are told, and I’m discovering that I’m not feeling particularly virtuous in this respect.

I think of my patients (patience too) and I look at the work ahead - and discover a cheat 😁 - I will be out there with fork, loppers and thick gloves digging those bramble footballs for 45 minutes, but then I can do ‘pruning’ by chopping up the bramble clippings into the garden waste bags, and then a quick water of my recently planted wildlife hedge, before returning to the digging. Ah yes - 3 different styles of work without compromising the ‘rate of work’ and still following my own advice and practising what I preach - not sure about braving the cold pack afterwards though!