Our two days of glorious gardening with gate shut

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

It all comes together perfectly. The Snapper and I both have two days off work. The sun shines in a cloudless pale blue sky. The front gate is closed and we aren’t going anywhere. Nobody wants anything from us and we don’t want anything apart from this: working together and apart in the garden.

You can almost feel overwhelmed when you first look at your garden after Winter, but it’s a mistake to turn this work into a burden. There’s never any point worrying about what you haven’t done, nor how much there is to do. As long as you get on with what you can do, and on the way make it what you want to do, worry can take early retirement.

It’s a pleasure, a joyous pleasure to be out in the sunshine, fingers in the soil of this tiny corner of the world. Beautiful soil it is too, able to both crumble and clay into a ball. Loads of big fat happy worms are working their way through this flower bed, on a tiny ring of limestone a few hundred yards from Lough Corrib. A quarter of a mile up the lane you hit bogland, but here the ground is lush, almost alluvial.

While the Snapper walks Lady Dog I start on the weeding. These days it’s not enough to plan the tasks ahead, I also have to factor in what my ageing body might sustain. So instead of going hell bent for leather and weeding the whole bed in one go, I stop half way, standing to stretch and groan a little.

My God! This place is glorious on such a day. Staring at the fields beyond, my mind wanders to those Paddy’s Day crowds elsewhere; all those thousands thronging the streets of Galway, and the village up the road; all those pints, parades and people.

Here right now it is incredibly peaceful, save for the welcome return of a wide variety of birdsong and the occasional stamp of hoof from the old piebald.

My girls return from their walk, the Snapper telling stories of how Lady ate a dead duck and rolled in a pile of pooh. That’s about as good as it gets for a dog, so we put the long training leash on her and hook her up to the pole of the twirly laundry dryer.

Lady is a rescue dog with a predilection for chasing anything on four legs. Yet thankfully for once there are no other dogs around, nor any nearby livestock to tempt and distract her.

She lies on the lawn, delighted for the chance to be outside, while we execute our minor St. Patrick’s Day tradition: welcoming back the garden by sowing sweet pea seeds.

There are endless debates about whether you should sow them inside or out, in Autumn or in Spring, but I plant them into containers in situ on Ireland’s national day, confident they’ll completely cover the ugly heating oil tank by the end of July.

To read Charlie’s full column, see this week’s Galway City Tribune.