November 19th 2010    Tim Candler

    Difficult to know how to treat an empty bed.  I used to like turning them over and over, on the understanding that frost was good for them, and the exercise was good for me.  Now I don't know.

    I could let them lie as they are until late winter, and then turn them over and over.  But this leaves a shagginess through the static months, and it is a shagginess that messes with my sense of the visual, because I am a person who likes lines and neatness in a garden. 

    And I guess it is this sort of fruitlessness that persuades people to think mulch. 

    It is an odd thing, because lines and neatness in my world occur nowhere else.  The room where I sleep is intensely chaotic.  I have piles from easily three years ago, and sometimes I discover things in here I have no memory of.   God knows what might be in the chest of drawers.

     More likely I am just shovel shy.  I need holes to dig, or new beds to make.   Better to work amongst the remaining Potatoes, so that I can at least double trench for a week or so before ground freezes.

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