Carol’s Column

Gardening tips stink

GARDENS are growing everywhere. Buds are budding, shrubs are shrubbing, and bulbs are bursting forth everywhere.

Except in my garden.

In my garden there are dog droppings, mole crickets, Parktown prawns, snails, Indian mynahs, stunted shrubs, emaciated rose bushes, cantankerous cannas and dead-before-birth daffodils. Why?

Mr Caithness's garden on the other side of the 3 m fence he built to protect his gentle spaniel from the amorous advances of Henry the Hog is blooming. Sweet peas, calendulas, ranunculuses and asters carpet his beds, his fruit trees are blossoming and his shrubs are leaf-laden.

So why does my garden look like the Namib Desert in an off season?

I discussed the problem with Loda Mphela, our gardening consultant, with whom I have, for 20 years, battled to produce a garden that is oozing colour from every pistil and stamen.

Together we surveyed the barren scene.

"What we need is chicken shit," said Mr Mphela, "the good, old fashioned stuff that stinks like nothing. All this new fangled stuff with chemicals and things is bad for the soil."

The oracle had spoken. I immediately ordered a lorry load of chicken manure to spread over our garden. Mr Mphela and I spent a weekend digging the natural, free-running fertiliser into every nook and cranny.

There are disadvantages to nature.

On Monday, Jamie and Nicky came down to breakfast with suitcases.

"Ma, you have to make a choice. It's either chicken manure or Nicky and me, but there is not room for all of us on this plot," said Jamie. Nicky nodded in agreement. "We smell like a sewerage works," she added.

The end justifies the means. The kids moved in with the Halls and we continued spreading chicken manure.

On Tuesday, while setting off on my early morning bike ride, the front wheel skidded, and I found myself making direct contact with the malodorous fertiliser.

"Isn't your new perfume a little strong?" muttered my financial asset when I passed him en route to the shower.

On Wednesday there was a crisis. "We have made a terrible mistake," said Loda Mphela at the crack of dawn, after three cups of tea, 12 spoons of sugar, six slices of bread with peanut butter and apricot jam and a plate of energising oats. "We have to dig the stuff up."

I thought I had misheard Mr Mphela. "Dig what up?" I asked.

"All the chicken droppings. Piet down the road says it's too strong to use on its own unless it's well-rotted and old. We've got to dig it up and let it get vrot," he said with feeling. "Then we put it back and you'll see, everything will grow like magic."

Which is why Mr Mphela and I spent the whole of Saturday retrieving the chicken manure, which, remarkably, had not lost any of its pungent, potent fragrance.

On Sunday we mixed it with leaves and compost that had been fermenting merrily for several months and left it to rot.

I watered my chicken-manure-denuded garden and prayed for a miracle. Oh, how I longed for a herbaceous border that would make the neighbours green with envy, for a mixed army of dahlias and marguerites, agapanthus and marigolds, alyssum and petunias, not to mention penstemons, phlox, salvias and rudbeckias. I wanted them marching across my beds.

On Monday, Loda Mphela woke me at 6 am. "I have the answer," he said throatily. He'd not yet had time for breakfast. "We must acquire pig urine. It is better than sheep, horse or cattle urine. Piet down the road says it is a magic fertiliser. It will make even the fence posts grow." Mr Mphela laughed. I did not.

The oracle had spoken. Have you ever tried to find pig urine in Johannesburg? It is not possible. Eventually we settled on third best, the horse variety.

And then a miraculous thing occurred. On Thursday, while strolling around my garden, I discovered a shoot. Brave and strong, it was peeping out from behind the jasmine that hadn't flowered.

On Friday, there was a huge flock of shoots. I was overjoyed. Loda Mphela and I celebrated the occasion by toasting the new growth with a dop of coffee and brandy. "So what are they?" I asked Mr Mphela.

"Ahh," he nodded wisely and clicked his false teeth that he'd bought at a jumble sale three houses away. "I don't rightly know," he admitted at last, "but not to worry, whatever it is, it's healthy."

On Friday, the shoots had doubled in size. Indeed, they were prolific and had spread throughout the garden.

I popped into the local nursery and proudly exhibited a shoot. "It's taken me 20 years," I said to the Dr Spock of gardening, "and at last I've succeeded. My garden is growing. Perhaps you could identify this shoot."

"This is sorrel," said the nursery man immediately. "It's a particularly fine specimen of its kind."

I puffed up with pride causing my new two-way stretch and flex corset to burst on the side seam.

"Yes," he continued, "this is the fastest growing weed there is, you'll never get rid of it. Aphids, thrips, red spiders and eelworms love it. You'll need an army to get rid of this catastrophe."

Only this morning my husband asked me what the South African Defence Force and Loda Mphela were doing in the garden spreading concrete everywhere.

Some things are too complicated to explain.

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