Gardening According to Pigeon

I don't know a great deal about gardening. I've managed to grow a few sunflowers in my time, and planted some seeds in my mother's rockery when i was little which then promptly took over the entire patch, but that's about as far as my expertise goes. So when i decided to embark upon planting my window box on my shed, i can't say i had great expectations. Massive hopes and excitement, but not expectations. Still, I poddled off to B&Q, to see what took my fancy.

I came away with a rather nice selection of evergreens, heathers and a tray of violas. This, added to the mass of bulbs i bought from Wilkinsons the other week, i was good to go.

First, I had to locate the tubs that fit into my window box that my mum had planted up a few years ago. They were suitably overgrown and spider infested.

Please don't be alarmed by the rather disturbing looking man sat on the bench. It's only Arthur. I am mostly creeped out by him since my mum brought him from my Grandad's garden, but seeing as he hasn't as yet jumped off the bench and hidden behind something and jumped out to scare me, I am slowly demoting him from ''creepy-ass'' to just ''odd''. I think I'll end up inheriting him at some point.

Anyway, after the trays had been purged of their weed-esque contents, i gave them a rinse with the new ultra-slick hose gun. They aren't sparkly clean, but as I'm just going to dump more dirt in them, I didn't feel it was a sensible use of my time and resources to go mad with the cleaning.

Then i did a bit of setting out and the briefest amount of thinking about where things would go.

Then came the hard part. Retrieving the bag of compost from a years worth of grime and spider encrustation. I fended off at least four spiders and a harvestman (weird spider that is technically all legs) before getting my mum to pull the bag out.

I then had the unenviable job of getting close enough to the spider infested bag to cut open the top and extract the compost. Scary times, but eventually I emerged triumphant....

With a shiny red bucket full of dirt. I am commander of all things peaty!

I then set about putting my plants in, randomly putting bulbs in along the way. Come spring i should have snowdrops, crocuses (croci?), grape hyacinth, bluebells, dark purple tulips, some poofy blue things and probably something else i can't remember. Seeing as i have no idea when it comes to gardening, i don't know whether I've spaced them correctly or anything, I've just bunged a load in and hope they grow.

Check out my mini conifer! Its a lemon scented....something or other. Apparently they grow to about 30ft, but if i keep trimming it, I'm sure i can keep it mini. I haven't named him yet, but he shall come in very handy as an exterior Krimble tree.

And there it is.

I know it doesn't look much at the moment, but the little evergreen bushes will grow, and in spring all the bulbs will come up, and i plan on putting some daisies in at some point. I thought the tiny evergreen shrub in the top right corner was the cutest little plant ever. My mum thought i was barmy, but sometimes you have to feel these things in order to tend to them properly.

I also bought some rosemary, as i do like it on potatoes. I put it in a nice square pot, with more bulbs hidden underneath.

I also had some heathers left over, so I made a heather tub, with a couple of bonus bulbs in.

I also discovered, while creating my flowery tubs of magic, that i had also succeeded in creating quite a large mess.

I did buy some gardening gloves, as you can see, but they are suspiciously clean because after initially handling the spidery compost bag, i quickly dispensed with them and just plunged my hands into the dirt. Plus side is that now my hands smell of rosemary. Downside is that now I need industrial cleaner to get the stuff out from under my nails.

Tomorrow, hopefully my polishing mops will come and i can finish my jewellery, but i also need to fix my window box so i can put my tubs in, and it will all be glorious. At the moment it is falling off my shed cuz the people who built it only nailed it in, so I'll need to screw it on properly, then the magic can be realised. Woo! After about four years of having the shed and windowbox, I'm finally putting something in it! Huzzah!