Ten gardening tips. You’re welcome.

6 May 2007

1. Don’t leave planting your potatoes so late that you’re digging through the potato sack for anything with even the slightest hint of a sprout on it.

2. Also, don’t start planting your potatoes in the evening, because it will be dark by the time you finish and you won’t be able to see what you’re doing.

3. Be ready to apologise profusely to your back muscles for all the digging and bending they’ve had to deal with.

4. Make little colour-coded markers with canes and insulating tape. It’s fun.

5. Take some of the distances required between plants with a pinch of salt, otherwise you’re not going to fit enough on your patch. And anyway, crammed is fun; there’s less room for weeds.

6. Let the blackbird come and eat the wireworms and bugs while you have a rest.

7. Don’t rest under the rowan tree, because the sparrows will shit on you.

8. Learn from last year’s paltry germination rate of the sweetcorn and put three seeds in each hole. Just like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pa did it: one for the blackbird and one for the crow – that’ll leave just one to grow.

9. Don’t bother being surprised any more when a quick dig of the patch unearths yet more brick and rubble, even though the patch has been dug and de-rubbled many times already.

10. Put your gardening T-shirt in the wash when you’re done, because the big dusty brown patches over your boobs look ridiculous.