Shit!

Mulching, manure & manicures

I have spent the morning in deep shit. But possibly not deep enough.

This is my first time mulching.

[ Unrelated bee loving the wallflowers, 18 March 2025 ]

Over the weekend I ran to the garden centre and bought two 50l bags of farmyard manure. I left them outside and forgot all about them until - GLORY! - the sun came out today.

“Mulch!” they all say. Everywhere you turn. The garden industry speaks with one voice on this topic. “MULCH!” Whether listening to Garden’s Question Time, or the lovely new Gardener’s World podcast series ‘Ask Alan’, or reading any garden-related writing, the answer to almost any problem is “MULCH!”

Got clay soil? MULCH! Got slugs? MULCH! Got sad roses? MULCH! Got no fruit? No veg? No money? No sex? No joy? No friends? MULCH!

So, I mulched.

I don’t like wearing gardening gloves. I think the contact between skin and soil is an absolutely critical part of why gardening is so therapeutic for me. Touch is such a thoroughly underrated sense in our manic world, and one that is so… grounding (heh, duh, obvs).

If I have learned anything over the past two weeks of distinctly fluctuating moods it’s that I am now basically solar powered. When the sun comes out, and I sit in my garden feeling its warmth on my skin, I am recharged. With the sun largely absent over the last few days, I have been flat as the battery of an abandoned Tesla.

[ Unrelated bee loving the wallflowers, 18 March 2025 ]

But, while being solar powered, I also find electric cabling to be a relatable metaphor for my spirit - a ‘live’ wire, a ‘neutral’ wire, and an ‘earth’ wire. The ‘earth’ wire allows the electrical current to flow into the earth, rather than everything going internally haywire and setting small fires, or, you know, blowing a fuse.¹

Anyway. I like touching earth. And so, sleeves of my Uniqlo gardening jacket rolled up (no longer available but almost identical to this one), ‘F*** off, I’m gardening’ cap on, I dug my hands into a large bag of manure.

The thought came to me on our dog walk this morning, as I was musing on today’s ‘to do’ list, that I never imagined myself having so much to do with poo. In my pre-gardening days the idea of this activity (scooping handfuls of poop out of a bag and spreading it around my property) would have sent me screaming to my therapist (I had a touch of OCD for a while). But now here I am, blissfully happy, with shit caked under my nails.

Despite having been told frequently that I should mulch, and how, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Initially I was carefully crouching down to lay handfuls of poo carefully around the base of my plants. But soon my back was like, ‘umm, no thank you’. Possibly I had angered it by lugging the large bags of manure through the house (I never do remember to lift with my knees).

So instead I just cast handful of it around - as if sprinkling breadcrumbs around for the ducks. When bored with this, I sat in one spot, with Leo on my lap, and threw handfuls of it, overarm, assuming that it would scatter and fall between the leaves of the plants. It mostly did. I’ve heard that mulch should be a good couple of inches deep. I have not achieved this. Frankly the cost and physical labour of achieving, like, 0.75 inches-ish, was plenty.

Once I had a decently thick layer of poo on each bed, I gave it all a good water, and voila! I think I’ve mulched!

[ Unrelated bee loving the wallflowers, 18 March 2025 ]

The smell of farmyard manure is both distinct and foreign in London. I mused on whether it was proper to post ‘sorry’ notes through the doors of my neighbours as I liberally sprinkled shit on my flowerbeds, and then - having given them all a good water - stepped back to revel in the scent of wet poop.

The next stage of mulching is one that I have not heard discussed. This also cracked a long-ambiguous gifting pattern in my family. Women of a certain age would start being given almost nothing but soaps and hand creams. I thought this odd and rather unimaginative, but then, I mulched.

I used to love getting manicures. I would never have painted nails in court unless it was the most subtle, nude colour imaginable, so it was a treat interspersed between trials. Now, though, even despite what I hear are increasingly hard-wearing and cost effective advances in gels, powders, and glues, there really seems no point. Gardening means keeping nails short and practical. A tiny price to pay for its many, many benefits.

But that doesn’t mean that nail care isn’t still something in which to luxuriate.

[ Unrelated Magnolia ‘Genie’, 18 March 2025 ]

Though I was enjoying the thick, black crud under my nails I nonetheless knew that I ought not to go around town like this, and so I ran warm water in the kitchen sink and squirted pure, heavenly joy onto my grubby, mucky hands.

Buying expensive hand soap is dumb. I know this. When I was making lots of money I wouldn’t have worried about it, but nowadays? Madness. A bottle of hand soap in Sainsbury’s is, like, £1. A tube of hand cream at Boots is like £1. There are ten zillion very well priced, perfectly good products I could use to wash and soften my increasingly rough and labour-sticken hands. But instead, I laid out a small fortune at Aesop.

In my defence, this was slightly by accident. I didn’t realise that their prices had gone up by about 300% since I last bought their soap. So I ran in, grabbed what I wanted, and when the salesperson told me the total at the till I was too embarrassed to say “WHAT! FOR SOAP?! THAT IS RIDICULOUS! OF COURSE I CAN’T BUY THIS!”. So I nonchalantly tapped my phone on the card reader, as if it wasn’t an action that would condemn me to three weeks in clouds of baked bean farts.

Anyway, today I was glad that I was such a coward, because I gave my filthy hands the most divine scrub with the Reverence Aromatique Hand Wash (it’s the one with gritty bits of pumice in it - so good) followed by a luxurious moisturise with the Resurrection Aromatique Hand Balm - mmmmm.

Equally as important as the wildly expensive soap to rinse off the horse poo is the nail brush. This is another item that was ubiquitous in the homes of older relatives and that I didn’t understand the value of until recently. But as a gardener you have to have the one with the mohawk bristles, like this one (of course you can find much cheaper plastic ones). I now have one next to every sink in the house. They are invaluable. But the single line of bristles is imperative for properly de-pooping.

I must say that I’m very glad I mulched. I was a bit on-the-fence about the value of mulching, but in fact I can immediately see that it is worth doing. My soil was rather grey and unhappy looking, but I hadn’t noticed until I dumped the thick, nutritious poop on top. Now the beds are a rich brown, and even visually one can tell that this is like giving the whole garden a huge, rich meal. A feast.

I am having to pause frequently as I type this to caress my gorgeously soft and scented hands. I think I will gift myself another dollop of hand balm before heading back out into the sun, to sit and recharge, and deep inhale the smell of all this gorgeous, nutritious shit.

1. Don’t @ me, I don’t know anything about science and how thing work but I like the metaphor. I think it works.