How much does your personality interfere with your enjoyment of life? This is a question I ask myself occasionally, mostly after I've roundly condemned as cheating something that other people welcome as a step to enjoyment. Such as buying a trained fruit bush.
I've long had a yen for a standard berry or a cordon - redcurrant or gooseberry. Yet I refuse to buy it because I have the strong feeling that I should be training it myself. So, what happens? Each year I don't start training one.
Admittedly, it's the cost that partly puts me off buying one ready-made, as they're more expensive than normal bare-root stock, but also I feel it's cheating. Surely, if I really want to call myself a proper gardener, I should be creating my own? I'd like to know that the superb specimen in the garden was a result of all my own efforts of growing, supporting, shaping. And each year I don't start, I put myself one year further away from enjoying any success I might have.
It's finally penetrated the old brain cell that one way to subvert my own stubborn nature is to get someone else give me a trained fruit bush as a Christmas present. The tiniest hint - something along the lines of, say, "Here's what I'd like for Christmas" with the page turned down in the catalogue - and I can dig the planting hole with the clearest conscience.
After all, it wouldn't be my fault if someone took me at my word, when I was just musing on "what ifs", would it?
Am I the only one who's got a slightly shame-faced wish for a Christmas present this year?
...Landscape Juice Network
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