The 6 Most Frustrating Gardening Tasks

The 6 Most Frustrating Gardening Tasks

DIGGING: You’re trying to move that bush to the place you should have planted it originally, only to discover that the roots are now approaching the centre of the Earth. After hacking into them for 25 minutes, you attempt to wrestle the plant to the ground with your bare hands, no longer caring if it lives or dies. The final humiliation is when you catch a glimpse of your spouse grinning at the lounge window.

DEADHEADING: A fiddly and fussy job, and you can’t help wondering if you ever actually looked at the faded bloom you’re now carefully snipping away at, and if you’ll ever actually look at the bloom that replaces it. As nobody else ever goes near your garden, what is the point of this exercise?

HEDGE CUTTING: Ignore the marketing blurb. All electric hedge cutters seem to weigh about 3.5 tonnes when your hedge is taller than shoulder height. If you’d wanted bigger biceps, you’d spend your days at the gym, not pottering about the garden.

WEEDING: At the time, it seems a pleasant and mindful way to spend a few hours. But there is payback coming. You haven’t been taking enough care to properly pull out the roots, so they’ll all be back this time tomorrow. And that soil ingrained under your fingernails won’t come out in the shower, but will slowly emerge onto your sandwiches over the next three days.

PRUNING: You start by gingerly cutting off a couple of unsightly branches and then start to fret that you may have gone too far and killed the plant. So you rush back indoors to watch a couple more Youtube videos, and the only thing they are clear about is that your shears need to be sharp. Well, you only bought them five years ago and they still seem to cut okay.

WATERING: You know that you should be harvesting every last raindrop that falls on your house and shed, and then waiting for the water butt to fill the watering can, and then lugging the heavy watering can to all corners of the garden. So there is a deep sense of shame and guilt as you spray a hose full of perfectly drinkable water all over the place. And then two hours later, there’s a downpour. Your weather app was wrong yet again!