Gardening for your health

   I'm guessing that I got my love of gardening from my mother. She would grow fruit and veg, harvesting everything possible and then storing the excess over winter with foods such as pickles and passata. One of our neighbours would pop round for some fresh mint, dropping off home grown cooking apples in return. Another would donate some home made elderflower wine for home grown offerings. As a child I would run around the framework of runner beans, observing ladybirds eating the blackfly, while at school my mother would drop off excess seedlings to other mums and school teachers who would be interested as she came to pick me up in the afternoons.

   However, now, that lovely garden that was once so rich with plants is overrun with weeds and overgrown trees. It's as though no one has looked after it in years. Wait...maybe because no one really has. Since my father died my mother has suffered bouts of depression and where she had grown so much of her own food there now stands weeds. Looking back at it all, society has somewhat changed. Most of those lovely neighbours (I knew the whole street when I was a child) have passed away or moved and new neighbours have been reluctant to integrate with everyone or have unfortunately been absolutely horrible. It's all very sad but my mother doesn't want to move and as I visit her once a week I thought it would be a lovely idea to work on her garden again so that she would enjoy it once more and reduce her shopping bills by growing her own.

   It's not going to be an easy project as the garden has become so very overgrown but I see this as a positive challenge! Over time I want to introduce easy to maintain plants and shrubs in the first half of the back garden, with fruit and veg in the second half. There is a shed in need of restoration and a greenhouse that is alive with the biggest spiders I've seen for a while!

   This will take a long time but I made a start late last year and I think that it would be a nice thing to share, to show people how gardening can be good for your well being and that it can be rewarding to work at something like this. For now I leave you with some images of how the garden looks at the moment:

 A very unloved lawn but one that can be fixed easily.

 Rubbish and overgrowth cover the entrance to the front garden.

 A leftover broken gnome sits sadly close to where there was once a big, beautiful hardy fuchsia. 

 There is a path buried under here which leads to the greenhouse, behind which grew raspberries.

 A close up of the greenhouse.

The shed that my father built and in front was the veg patch (imagine runner beans, carrots, onions, tomatoes and herbs)