ENTROPY

What a word!

Perfectly describes both myself and my garden.

Everything returning to its lowest common denominator - e.g. zero.

The garden strains to revert to wild jungle, the body strives to return to the soil from whence it sprung - well sort of.

Everything is desperately trying to fall to bits.

Actually the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as (amongst other things) :- A measure of the disorganisation or degradation of the universe.

Big stuff ! Prefer just the simple thought of everything running down.

So to prevent this happening takes a lot of effort and energy - weed the flowerbeds, mow the lawn, deadhead, spread the manure, prune and trim etc. (and that's just the human body!)

So one has to get crafty.

Now, I had a banking deep in docks and nettles and hogweed and bindweed and - well you get the idea. So I cut it back and covered it with black plastic - ugly but effective. Then I dug the top of the banking and manured it well.

Into this I planted pumpkins, courgettes, butternut squashes and, at one end, some chillies.

Pumpkins love to sprawl so now they can do so down the plastic - I do not have to weed and the black creates a hot microclimate.

Courgettes, picked, sliced and fried within an hour have a flavour you never get from the vegetables in the supermarkets.

Of course, if you forget to pick them you have marrows.

Two years ago I had a whopper and hung it in the shed in a net bag to keep for later in the year. Unfortunately it rotted (entropy) and when I took it down disintegrated in a mushy, smelly mess all over me.

Marrow stuffed with mince and baked is also stuffed with memories - but that is for another blog.