A couple of years ago I was telling my son about an idea I’d had.
“I think I’m going to start an Airbnb for gardens.”
“What do you mean?”, he said.
“People who don’t have gardens could rent space from people who do but can’t be bothered to garden them.”
He pushes out his bottom lip and nods.
“That’s actually quite a good idea.”
Predictably I didn’t do anything about it.
I was once told that the difference between entrepreneurs and other people was not the number of ideas they have but their ability to act on them.
Planting out my cucumbers in one of the new raised beds and erecting an elaborate arrangement of netting to stop next door’s cats digging them up I think about the pleasure I get from growing my own vegetables.
The following morning, after a hard night’s rainfall, all of the little cucumber plants have been eaten by snails and slugs and all the work I did nurturing them in my daughter’s bedroom, which she has recently described as “a rainforest”, has come to nothing.
I think about how nice it would be for someone to rent my garden and just give me some of the produce they’ve grown
I consider planting the carrots until some extremely attractive multicoloured varieties turn up ready to eat in the weekly vegetable box.
The sunflowers and tomatoes that my son and his girlfriend have grown from seed, for the first time in their lives, are beginning to look like particularly vigorous triffids. Maybe I could hand the garden over to them for a small rent.
Back in the house, I sit down with the dog who has little interest in the garden and even less in cucumbers.
In the paper, there is an article about a woman who wanted to grow some vegetables but didn’t have space so she ended up renting a little plot from her neighbour as he had more garden than he could cope with.
He didn’t have much time for gardening because he was busy launching a business a bit like Airbnb for gardeners where he put local people together in order to share bits of garden they weren’t using.
He already has 1,000 people signed up for the scheme, which is about to launch in London.
I feel a bit sad although I don’t really know why.
I stare out into my garden and see next door’s cat sitting on the fence, just above the raised beds.
Later I show the article to my son, who laughs, and I’m not sure whether his reaction makes me feel more or less ridiculous.
“You should have done it,” he says.
“I might have done twenty years ago,” I say, knowing full well that I wouldn’t.
The dog and I head out into the garden where she starts to chew at the grass next to the once beautiful jasmine that appears to have died, possibly from apathy.
As I’m wondering what the joy of gardening is anyway, I lift the cover that’s been protecting one of the raised beds from the cats and find the unmistakable green shoots of potatoes that have taken it upon themselves to seed in regrowth from last years crop.
Like a prospector in the Gold Rush, I dig the soil-covered nuggets and pile them by the spade, like the treasure I feared I had somehow lost.
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