Gardening – a brief guide (part one – the fundamentals and the seasonals).

garden tools

Spring Bank Holiday is almost upon us in the UK and all thoughts turn to the garden and gardening. The garden centre is filled to capacity and, for once, not just with people waiting for the Sunday Roast. My little gardening guide is split into three parts, which will take us into and through the bank holiday. In the time you will eventually take to read it, you could have planted any number of shrubs, mowed several lawns or painted the shed. Just think of that… Now, would you like me to run you a bath?

Let us begin with a definition:
Gardening – The act of undertaking tasks for which you are not equipped, in a hostile environment full of lethal dangers both natural and manmade, from which you have no protection.

It is the arrival of Spring that first sends us tottering out into the garden with a broom handle (with or without broom head) to prop up the wonky fence panel; a dinner fork (as the garden fork will have rusted away) with which to dig up everything that has died over the winter, and several trays of various seedlings that we can watch over as they die in the weeks ahead. Each season brings its own challenges:

• Spring: the long, dark nights of winter are falling behind us and the time has come to collect together all of the tools that you accidentally left outside at the beginning of winter and spray them with WD40 – even though you know perfectly well that it will not work. Buds fill, leaves unfurl, early blossoms glisten in the morning dew and the door falls off the shed. Now is the time to give the lawn its first cut of the year, carefully replacing all the divots ripped from the ground by the winter-blunted blades as you go. However early you choose to make this first cut, it is always a) too early for nature and b) too late for your partner.
• Summer: your garden will be in full bloom. Now is the time to take a garden seat, reattach the leg with a six-inch nail, sit and enjoy the riot of colour and scent that is your garden in full bloom. Now is the time to throw away last year’s rusty – and let’s face it, unhygienic – barbecue and, if you’ve any sense at all, never to consider buying a replacement. Ever. Now is the time to find out where next-doors bloody cat keeps doing its business.
• Autumn: season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. In my experience, garden fruit exists in only two states: a) unripe and b) rotten. If you find something that looks ripe and hasn’t been half-eaten by insects, it is almost certainly poisonous. Now is the time to repair and pack away for winter. As most of your tools remain unusable from being left out over the previous winter and your garden furniture is so rotten it won’t even burn, there seems little point. Make the most of the relative warmth of long autumn evenings by filling the garden with candles. There is nothing quite like the combination of fading autumn light, flickering candle flame and red wine to heighten the awareness of your own mortality. ‘Tis the season to be maudlin. Although the insect-life is much reduced by now, most of what remains will either bite or sting or both. Wear a knitted hat at all times when in the garden. There is nothing worse than approaching winter with a grotesquely swollen ear that makes you look like Dumbo when viewed from the side.
• Winter: the best of all seasons in which to enjoy your garden – from inside. Revel in the fact that at this time of year nobody expects a person of your age to be out in the cold – and, also, that when covered in a thick blanket of snow, this is the one time when your garden looks just as good as everybody else’s.

The modern gardener faces a number of horticultural challenges seldom faced by their urban predecessors:

Hanging Baskets – The horticultural equivalent of the Mayfly: leave it unattended for 24 hours and it will die. If the weather is dry, it will die. If it is windy, it will die. If it is raining, it will somehow escape the water and die. I, on the other hand, will not escape the water as I will be outside watering the f*cking thing. Allowing the hanging basket to die is punishable by death or long silences punctuated by sighing.

Pots and Containers – Similar to hanging baskets (above) with the added attraction that whilst they too will dry out and die within twenty-four hours if not watered, they will also become waterlogged in the rain – and die.

Ponds – All the joys of a garden, with the option of drowning. If you must have a pond, just don’t be tempted to stock it up with expensive fish: they will only be eaten by next door’s cat who will continue to crap in your wellies regardless. As elsewhere in your garden, any expensive plants will quickly be swamped by weed which is almost impossible to remove. Ponds will attract all manner of wildlife to your garden: birds, frogs, toads, newts and god-knows-what when the lights have gone out. Official advice is that ponds require regular cleaning. If you have ever driven along the side of a canal that is being dredged, you will know how pleasant this task is. Whatever lurks at the bottom of the pond is either dead, smelly, slimy or all of the above. My advice is to leave it where it is. It may be a little unsightly, but the frogs seem to like it and the water is generally so green that you can never see the bottom anyway. Waterfalls and/or fountains require a suitable electric point from which to run them. The one thing I know about electricity is that it is never good news when mixed with water. Unless you want to get involved in a row with your neighbour over how, exactly, his cat came to be hurled, smoking, over the fence after trying to drink out of your pond, don’t bother with a pump of any kind. An electric pond pump will fuse the house more often than an inopportune finger in a leaking kettle and leave you continually fishing dead things out of the murky depths (preferably after turning off the electric). If you want to make more of a feature of your pond you could introduce some floating solar lights. They never work, but they do provide a convenient resting place for passing birds and they will not electrocute you when they finally fill up with water, turn upside down and sink.

D.I.Y (part 2) – doors, decorating and electrical shenanigans.

paint brushes

…So, we begin part two by presuming that you have not had to visit Accident and Emergency and that, flushed with shelf-hanging success, you may have decided that you wish to attempt door hanging. The main advice I can offer at this point is ‘For God’s sake, make sure it’s an internal one’. For a start, there are no awkward locks for you to fit back to front and it doesn’t matter quite so much if it doesn’t shut. The necessary equipment and the methodology are similar to shelf hanging except that it involves hinges that will initially be affixed to the wrong side of the door. In addition to your previously assembled toolkit you will also need a plane with which you will remove three inches from the top of the door and half an inch from the bottom, all at an angle of forty-five degrees. Do not even consider an electric plane unless you want to end up with something from which you can make the front of your bird box. A slight draught is one thing, but being able to walk between the newly fitted door and the frame without touching either is quite another. Never attempt to remove the bottom of a door with a saw; you will only end up having to nail it back on. Saws are seldom a good idea for the DIY enthusiast: you will never have the right one and you will always end up hacking bits off with a bread knife anyway.

Once you have hung your door, you may wish to paint it. Beware. However small you leave it, once painted it will always stick, even if it does not physically touch the frame. This is one of the great mysteries of our age, like why hats only ever suit somebody else. Now, there is, God forbid, just the outside chance that your experience of door painting might give you the taste for decorating in general. Please believe me when I tell you that shutting your tongue in the car boot will be less painful in the long run. If you must put stuff on the walls, at least stick to emulsion; that way you will only ruin the carpet and the furniture, the house itself will at least retain some value.

If, by some miracle, you emerge from the other side of painting a wall with your health and house intact, you may be determined to create a ‘feature wall’ by hanging wallpaper. If this is the case, I can say little except that you are obviously more daft than you look. If you cannot be dissuaded from such a course, then kindly allow me to offer some observations based solely upon my own bitter experience. I hope they help:

• All wallpaper is tapered. It might fit at the top, but never at the bottom.
• The pattern on wallpaper is never even. It might match at the top, but it will stray badly by the time you reach the gaps at the bottom.
• The ‘pattern repeat’ information on the label is merely a trap for the unwary.
• Wallpaper stretches – but never where you want it to.
• Wallpaper tears – but never until it’s nearly finished.
• Always cut the wallpaper around light switches and electric sockets whilst it is wet. Once it has dried you will never find them again.
• Scissors, even when new, are never sharp enough to cut wet wallpaper.
• Do not attempt to trim the wallpaper with a razor blade. Wet wallpaper is like blotting paper. A pint of blood will leach over an entire wall.
• Bubbles in drying wallpaper should be popped with a pin. Once popped, they should dry flat. They should, but they never do.
• If the bubbles make a shrieking noise when you pop them, you have probably papered over the cat.
• If you want to remove the wallpaper in six months time, you will require a flame-thrower.
• If you do not want to remove the wallpaper in six months time, it will fall off.
• The pattern is never upside down until after you have finished.

In the somewhat unlikely event that you might wish to attempt tiling, the one piece of advice I feel equipped to offer is not to worry too much about straight lines. Just be grateful if they stay on the wall.

For those of you with an even more adventurous DIY bent, there is always plumbing to be tackled. Much like binge drinking, it is only really a suitable pastime for the young and fit. Like binge drinking, it also tends to make an awful mess of the carpet. If you really must try your hand at plumbing, let me suggest something very simple at first. How about stopping the kitchen tap from dripping without ramming a huge lump of blu-tack up the end of it? Fitting a new washer to a tap is the simplest job in plumbing – which is why you can never find anybody to do it. If you feel as though you really want to attempt pipework, let me offer this solitary recommendation: always use compression joints in preference to the soldered variety. They will still leak, but at least you won’t burn the house down.

Which finally brings us to electrical works. In the UK it is now, thankfully, illegal for the amateur to carry out most electrical projects. DIY enthusiasts are largely restricted to changing socket fronts and light switches – although this still allows ample opportunity to fuse the rest of the neighbourhood. In the UK, the electrical wires are colour-coded; Live (brown), Neutral (blue) and Earth (yellow/green) with red and black thrown into lighting circuits. Improvisation is not encouraged: an incorrectly wired light switch may lead to a neighbourhood blackout, singed nasal hairs and fused dental work.

There are, of course, many other DIY tasks that you might consider taking on, from the most straightforward – drilling an outside wall in order to put up a hanging basket bracket – to the slightly more advanced task of rebuilding your house again afterwards. I may return to some of them at a later date – like a burglar returning to the scene of somebody else’s crime – not so much a harbinger of doom as the Prince of I-told-you-so. In the meantime, whatever you may choose to do, remember always why you are doing it: because you are too mean to pay somebody else to do it properly.

D.I.Y (part 1) – constructing bird boxes and hanging shelves.

black claw hammer on brown wooden plank

Easter. Time to face up to all those jobs you’ve been putting off since this time last year. Please accept my little Easter guide in the spirit in which it was written e.g. to give you something to do whilst you are attempting to concoct a reasonable-sounding excuse for not doing them. It is a little longer than normal, so it is split into two parts – not unlike sections of your anatomy if you are not careful…

As you grow older, and your time becomes less consumed by children, dangerous sports and Himalayan trekking holidays, you may feel the need to fill the void with a more age-appropriate pastime. Sadly, many will consider that sitting in an armchair drinking cider and doing the quick crossword is not such a hobby, and you may be forced to seek something a little more challenging. There will come a time in the life of all of us when we are tempted to say, “I’m not paying that. If I had the tools, I could do it myself, it can’t be that difficult.” Well, here’s my first warning for you: generally it is. All DIY projects end up costing considerably more than getting a tradesman in. A friend of mine once managed to remove the party wall between himself and the neighbouring bungalow whilst putting up a photo frame. He is, I believe, now a speech writer for Donald Trump. Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that all DIYers are so inept (there is, after all, only one Donald to go around) but the potential is always there. Never-the-less, if you feel you really must give it a go, I find it incumbent upon myself to offer such advice as I am able. Since you have probably decided to ignore my imploration to quit whilst you are ahead, e.g. before you have started, we may as well begin.

Before commencing any DIY project it is important to ensure that you have the following items easily to hand:

• Elastoplast
• Antiseptic Cream
• Mobile phone pre-programmed to dial 999
• Car: this is essential in order to fetch the vital components or tools that you always manage to forget until half way through the job
• A small child to blame when it all goes wrong.

Most prospective DIYers will begin with a little woodwork. The lure of producing a 3-legged coffee table, an asymmetrical magazine rack or a wonky pipe-rack will prove irresistible to many. In addition to the wood, which is available from any good timber merchants at little more than two to three times the price of a finished product, you will need tools. Woodworking tools are seldom, if ever, used for their intended purpose. A chisel is usually used to hack a notch into the top of a pozidrive screwhead when you do not have a pozidrive screwdriver with which to remove it. A smaller chisel is subsequently used to remove the screw when you discover that you have also forgotten the other screwdriver. A nail punch may then be employed to drive the screw head into the wood when you discover that the chisel will not remove it. Your shoe will be used when you discover that you have lost your hammer. You will also need a stout toolbox from which to misplace your tools.

Warning: All woodworking tools are either sharp, pointed or both. If you must keep woodworking chisels I suggest that you blunt them by knocking holes into walls when your drill has fused.

Let us begin by looking at a suitable early project for the keen DIY woodworker: the bird box. Begin by constructing a simple box of 4 equal sides, a top and a bottom which can be held together with nails and glue or, if you have misplaced the hammer and bought toothpaste instead of glue, blu-tack. The box should have a sloping roof (as it is likely to slope in all directions, just choose the surface that slopes the most) and a little hole at the front through which the birds can enter. When correctly assembled the box should be capable of being lifted without the bottom falling out. Take a photograph of the finished box before it ‘weathers’ (falls to pieces) and put it out into the garden in the spring. Having been affixed to a suitable tree, shed or bonfire, the nest box will remain unused for three years before you discover that the hole is too small. By this time the bottom will have fallen out anyway and the perch will have been taken away by a sparrow for nesting material.

At some stage all DIY enthusiasts will be called upon to hang a shelf. Before you commence the project you should amass the following:

• Electric drill
• Chuck key for a completely different drill
• 3 semi-rusted drill bits, none of which are suitable for masonry, one of which has not had its head broken off during a previous project
• A selection of wall plugs, all for the wrong kind of wall
• A selection of screws in different sizes, none of which match the wallplugs
• A selection of screwdrivers, none of which match the screws.

Warning: Electric tools offer all the risks associated with other woodworking equipment multiplied by 240 volts.

Choose a likely-looking drill bit and insert it into the drill chuck and tighten best you can. If it wobbles a bit, don’t worry too much unless it shoots out when you turn the drill on and decapitates your daughter’s goldfish. Then worry. Carefully measure and mark the walls and drill the holes in something resembling the right kind of area. Insert the wall plug. If it will not fit, chop a bit off it with a kitchen knife and hammer it in with a ladle. If it is too small, simply insert another plug inside it and hammer it in with a ladle. Put shelf against the wall and insert a screw into any hole that roughly matches a wall plug. Tighten as far as the screwdriver allows and then hammer in the rest of the way with a ladle. Now, take a photograph of your shelf in situ before it has the chance to fall from the wall and scalp the cat. Find something suitable to put on the shelf that will not roll down the slope and blu-tack it in place.

Warning: never sit underneath a shelf – particularly if you put it up.