by Steve Marshall

Created on: November 05, 2009

I don't know what gardening on the edge refers to, but gardening has certainly often set me off the edge.

One such occurrence took place only a few short weekends ago.

My wife and myself had hopped up early on the sunny Saturday morning, donned our gardening shoes, and then we had put on our gardening hats and gloves.

We spent quite an enjoyable morning together preparing a new garden bed in the front of our house. Digging the edges and borders and upturning the hard packed clay soil. We had first worked hard to remove the grass covering, and then after digging up the heavy clods of clay, we had added plenty of cow manure, gypsum, and another soil improver, plus a handful or two of a good organic fertiliser.

This was really a very good and productive morning's work, and we were both happy with the end result.

What sent me off the edge, was the following Saturday's follow-up session that was planned to take place within the same newly prepared and now ready to plant in garden bed.

Our intention was to plant the five small bushes that we had spent several hours browsing around a few nearby nurseries to carefully select. We had also bought two rather large bags of mulch to lay down on top of the soil to complete the job too our perfection.

Read here to my wife's perfection really.

She is so neat and methodical and has such a good eye for this type of task. I would have just started digging, but she had so carefully marked out the lines for us to dig into with an orange can of spray paint.

There is a funny little aside story here, because my wife comes from a different culture to mine, and she hadn't ever used spray paint before. Before I could stop her, she was looking down at the top of the can, and then she had without further thinking about it, pressed the trigger to test if it was working or not.

I guess she expected it to spray downwards somehow, and not upwards. But you have to actually turn the can upside down to achieve this.

Unfortunately for her though it was all working most perfectly.

She had now sprayed marking paint onto her face, her nose, her hair, and some had even gone into her eyes. There was not enough to seriously cause any real problems though. After cleaning up inside with some water and face towels, she was soon back outside to help me once more again with the heavy work of removing the dug out grass clumps.

Anyways, this next following Saturday morning was even hotter than the previous weekend's had been. We were approaching the hot dry

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