Gardens

I am not a gardener but I potter about trying to get things to grow and usually failing miserably. When you have a garden ther seems and unwritten obligation to keep it looking like something, but unless you have the will and the ability, it is hard to keep it up. I like a nice lawn, and I work quite hard on keeping my little patch of grass healthy. I feed it and cut it regularly, trim the edges and reseed or returf the bald spots each year. It gets more attention than many ladies nether regions and yet it manages to look good for few weeks of the year only. As soon as it starts to get warm, it starts to let me down and by the end of the summer it looks like one of the less fertile areas of the Gobi desert.
This year I decided to get on top of the vegetable patches too and assiduously dug, raked and weeded them so that they would be ready to accept the seedling that I had started off in the greenhouse. Then we had to go away for a ten day period and of course it chose to be warm and sunny and when I got back, all my seedlings had died. I now have a choice - to say sod it and forget the garden this year, or to buy lots of plants from a garden centre and let them die when we go away on holiday again. The former option seems more attractive but then the whole place will become overgrown and shabby and I'll have to spend hours getting it back to a reasonably tidy shape. It all seems pretty futile and I can understand why many people cover their gardens with paving or gravel. Even that though is a lot of work and expense, and it looks pretty awful too.
I suspect that the size of the garden, along with a body that is failing will be the trigger that initiates a move, and probably away from the island that has been home since 1971. The mainland, or at least one of its inhabitants beckons and it cannot be long before the siren call has to be answered.