Tania McCartney Blog: What We've Been Doing to the Backyard

Poor backyard.

We've poisoned it, poked it, dug in it, scraped it. We've pushed, pulled, rumbled and tumbled it. We've brought in a bobcat and skinned it bare. Then we left massive deposits of top soil and craters like the surface of the moon. You could feel the spirits of the earth groaning.

Yes, we've maimed it, but it's for a purpose. You see this horrid, rock-solid clay soil (below) where nothing but nothing grows?

Well, we poisoned it all and got rid of the weeds and skanky grass. It was two weeks of waiting for it all to turn to straw and a young son champing at the bit to kick a ball.

Then what we did was we started to dig around for underground watering pipes. We didn't have a map so we just guessed and dug and followed the plastic black pipe.

Soon after that, we hired a great monster to come in and take enormous bites out of the land. It was agonising. I hid inside, cringing, ready to just let loose on the crying at any moment.

When the man in the monster left our backyard raped and pillaged and piled high with top soil, I surveyed the damage. Broken plastic black pipes everywhere. I emailed Husband to warn him it was ugly and we still had days of work ahead of us.

He came home that night, rolled up his sleeves and set to work.

The next night, we had dear friends Mary O'Dwyer and Craig Allingham over for dinner and they were gracious enough to not even mention the moonscape in the backyard. They instead focused on the delicious dinner before them. You can see the imposing background dinner view clearly, nonetheless.

The next day, I went to Mary's amazing Pelvic Floor Workshop (she's a leading physio in the Down Under area) and learnt all the things one shouldn't do to damage the pelvic floor. Then I came home and joined Husband and dug and shovelled and raked... and everything I'd learned at this workshop became totally undone.

I did brace, though.

During that day, we also dragged out the Christmas boxes (suckers for punishment) and the house was thence filled with dirt, dust and tinsel in sort of a disco/rubbish tip haze. It was a surreal day.

To finish off the day, we put snags and onions on the barbie and gobbled them with salad after a day in the garden, a few beers and kids playing happily amongst the tinsel and dirt. A quintessential almost-summer Aussie day. Then the kids went nutso; they put underwear on their heads and leapt around the trampoline, being totally unhelpful.