Having planted enough bushes for now, we have turned our attention to the part of the garden that is in direst need of attention: the part between the house and the root cellar, formally known as “the slope of weeds”.
The name summarizes two of the three salient characteristics of this place. It is a steepish slope, hard to walk without holding on to something. And it is full of weeds, and has been since we first arrived here. It is dominated by bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis, åkervinda, kassitapp) and greater celandine (Chelidonium majus, skelört, vereurmarohi) with accents of nettles, wild strawberries, and other weeds. In the middle of it all, a little spiraea bush, buried under bindweed during most of the growing season, the previous owners’ single attempt to tame this slope. (You cannot even see it in the photo below but it’s grown a bit in the last four years, despite the inhospitable surroundings.)
The third important fact about the slope of weeds is that the earth is full of junk. At the top there is a thin layer of reasonable garden soil. Beneath this soil is a layer of junk. Garbage. Trash. In some parts the junk is buried under 15 cm of earth; in other places it reaches all the way to the surface. It is the only part of the garden that is dangerous for bare feet. The chunks of concrete and roofing tiles are not so bad; the shards of glass are pretty dangerous.
Altogether this makes the slope quite unwelcoming, and improving it is a major project. You can’t just clear away the weeds and plant something nicer, because you can’t even work the soil without hitting all sorts of foreign objects all the time.
Now we intend to fix all three things at once. We will get rid of the weeds and the junk by removing and replacing enough of the earth to get a workable, plantable ground. We won’t get rid of the slope-ness of the slope but we will have stairs built along the wall to make the slope passable.
Our friend Anton the Builder will arrive on Monday to start working on the stairs. To prepare, we’ve been doing a lot of digging: removing the topmost layer of soil with all the weeds and their roots, evening out the slope nearest the house to make place for the stairs, and digging a hole for the concrete slab that the stair will rest on. We’ve already filled two 1m3 sacks with earth, stones, and other stuff, and have begun on a third one.
The amount of junk coming out of the earth there is astounding, as is the variety.
Chunks of concrete, roofing tiles, bathroom tiles and bricks.
An entire sack of cement.
Shards of pottery, china and glass.
Electrical wires. Rope. A one-metre iron T-bar. A bin bag.
Nails, both large old rusty ones and modern stainless steel.
The heel of a shoe. A spoon. A pitchfork.
A candy wrapper.
A small glass bottle with a bit of dried nail polish.
A metal tube for mayonnaise or something like it.
A door from a wood stove.
Bones of some large animal. Cow, perhaps.
It’s like a midden combined with a dump for construction waste.
One interesting fact is the wide time span that this material covers. The large nails and the stove door are old, and the bricks as well: they’re not the modern sort that are half hollow, but solid, heavy, old-style bricks. Other things are much more modern, such as the candy wrapper and the wires.
I have tried to imagine how this came to be, but I have a hard time making sense of this. Who would throw old plates and bones in their garden, or pitchforks and china? And why? In what scenario could it possibly seem like a good idea to have shards of glass in your garden? Or did some of this come from somewhere else as part of some cheap load of fill dirt?
In any case, while it makes the digging slow and laborious, it also makes the whole project feel like an archaeological dig. I never know what I will find next.
[…] as possible to make the garden safe for bare feet. For years we made sure to always wear shoes on the slope of weeds. But there’s a lot of ground I haven’t touched, so there’s plenty more […]