Squat-in-the-muds

Kash and I returned to Mr L's garden almost 5 months after our initial visit. Last time we were here, it was summer and it was sunny. Today, it was the complete opposite, having been pouring with rain throughout the morning before we turned up on Mr L's doorstep.

Mr L really wanted another round of grass cutting, but he told us that it was too wet today to use his lawnmower. We agreed, the grass was soaking wet. Not to be defeated, we asked if there was anything else that we could do in the garden. After a bit of convincing that we did want to help in these weather conditions, Mr L directed us to his vegetable patch and asked us to weed around his spinach and chives.

We walked over to the vegetable patch and identified the spinach which was the main thing to keep. It wasn't your usual supermarket baby spinach. This stuff was huge! Some leaves being larger than a pitta bread. At least it would be easy to spot what to keep.

As we stepped into the veg patch, Kash asked me if I could do a Slavic squat. I had no idea, so after a demonstration, we set ourselves in position with our knees pointing up, bums down and shoes setting into the mud. The weeding didn't throw of our balance too much as the rain had made the weeds quite easy to pull out, so we got to work with more and more mud getting caked on our shoes and gloves. 40 minutes in, with a nice clear patch of dirt starting to appear around the giant spinach, the heavens opened again and Mr L called us over to the house to tell us to go home.

While we didn't want to give in, the conditions were pretty bad. We took time to hose down our shoes and then we said that we'd be back to mow the grass another time. Kash and I were both thinking that this might not happen until the new year though. There was no respite when we left Mr L's house either as we had long runs back to get to towels, dry clothes and dry shoes.