Surviving lockdown with the lagom garden project

When I decided to pursue my create space project at the start of the month little did I think that the corona virus lockdown would contribute by increasing space in my daily timetable, or that my aim of achieving calm and simplicity would become a crucial factor in trying to maintain sanity in everyday life. For over a year I’ve been posting a weekly personal blog every Sunday. Usually the subject matter occurs to me during the preceding week and, as I ruminate over the hours and days that follow, the sentences and paragraphs form in my mind and when I sit down to write (or type) the words flow. Last Sunday I couldn’t string two words together. I was blocked. I’ve experienced this feeling before, and can usually overcome it by ‘getting something down on paper’. But this time there was nothing. I wanted to write about my reflections on risk (I had a title), or how I was reacting to the current virus crisis, but there was no way I could put my thoughts into words, or even marshal them into some semblance of order. This was stress at its very best. You might think that the prospect of twelve weeks of quiet downtime, isolation and lockdown is an ideal opportunity to get that novel or memoir finished (or even started), but anxiety has a way of disrupting the flow of creative juices. Nevertheless, creativity is exactly what’s needed right now, to calm the monkey mind, and so I went out and started gardening. 

The new potager 

Pulling weeds, pruning trees and digging soil in the warm Spring sunshine and for a few hours I almost forget the madness going on in the world right now. Gardening is very lagom, especially growing your own vegetables. So, thanks to the hard work of Mr VV, we now have the beginnings of a potager, we just need some seeds and a few more weeks of good weather. There is so much work to do here that we won’t have the time to become bored. It’s great exercise too. I find I don’t need to worry too much about packing in the steps on the Fitbit when I’m trundling wheelbarrows around. Any after gardening stiffness is soon resolved by a good yoga practice, another activity I’ve ramped up, as have many others. Physical exercise is so good for the sleep pattern, too. Monkey mind rarely manages to triumph over tired and aching limbs, and there is something meditative about weeding.

With five acres that haven’t seen much more than a cursory trip round with the tractor mower for the last whoever knows how many years there is no shortage of work to do. We decided to start nearest to the house and first tackled a lovely sunny area that was once a brick paved terrace. At eleven o’clock in the morning it will be the perfect place to sit on a bench and enjoy a cup of freshly brewed coffee whilst admiring the fruit of our labours (or spotting more work to do). Once the array of pots, buckets and hosereels (five in total??) were removed I set to work on the tangle of shrubs and trees, bringing in Mr VV when necessary with the saw. Most of the shrubs were beyond simple pruning, so we implemented our favourite ‘slash and burn’ tactic; they’ll all grow back eventually. After a couple of days scrubbing the paving, the beautiful old Suffolk red bricks started to resurface and the sunlight poured into what will in future become a cosy little hygge corner.

Before and after on the terrace 

With the lockdown it is so quiet out in the village. Occasionally a car will drive up the road, but it seems that we have gone back in time, to the days when the house was built. A few people take a walk around in the mid-afternoon, and although we have to maintain our safe distance, there is often a cheery wave or a shout of encouragement. The local wildlife aren’t in lockdown though. It’s lovely to pause, lean on the fork, and listen to birds chirping in the shrubs or watch the naughty jackdaws ferrying twigs back and forth to the chimneys. We see the squirrels daily, and we know there are foxes and badgers about, but they tend to keep a low profile. However, one afternoon we were rewarded with the sight of a tiny muntjac deer, peeking out from his hidey hole in the corner of the overgrown orchard. He reminded us that whilst we will do our best to tidy up, some spots must be left for the creatures that have made the untamed grounds their home.

Cyril the squirrel, just after breaking the bird feeder

It’s taken me almost a week to get back in front of the computer screen. In fact, it took two days to write this post. However, I have learned that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I don’t write a post every week, if I don’t make it to 10,000 steps every day, if I don’t get every task on the to-do list ticked off, if I don’t do a full hour of yoga. That’s all part of creating space; space to enjoy the simple pleasures around; that’s lagom. Hopefully, next Sunday I’ll be back again, writing about the lagom lockdown larder. The words are already spilling into my mind …