The rain held off just long enough for me to plant my last few tulip bulbs, scatter blood, fish and bone along the dahlia bed and apply a new topping of Strulch, then I could delete Tidy dahlia bed and plant tulips from my list of Things to do. I read an article in the newspaper by a life management guru who said that if you insisted on having a list then it should be a maximum of five items long. In that case I am doing it wrong, since mine currently has 87 things on it.
I don't worry too much about the total, having no illusion that everything on the list is ever going to get done anyway. And the items on it are of wildly different sizes and complexity. In at number 33 is Weed little bit of dahlia bed outside greenhouse. That would take about two minutes, or maybe ten or even fifteen if I also mulched it with mushroom compost and Strulch. In fact I did weed most of it one afternoon when I was keeping an eye on the chickens, but they wandered off before I could finish the job, as they did in the case of number 47, Weed gravel where moved logs. Quite a few tasks on the list are largely or partly done, but for some reason I haven't finished them to a standard where I feel they are definitively Done and can be ticked off.
Some were huge jobs to begin with. Clear brambles in meadow around wildlife pond has absorbed several days' work and there's still at least another couple required to finish it. Cut lawn edges is a more or less ongoing project, since by the time I've got to the end it's normally time to start again at the beginning. I would have hoped that for a few weeks during winter they'd all be trim, but the weather has been so mild that the grass has never stopped growing.
The list was originally compiled as a sort of scoping exercise. I took a mental walk around the garden, tried to remember what outstanding domestic admin there was, considered anything I needed for the forthcoming beekeeping season, ran a mental tally of which friends and relations I hadn't seen for too long, and wrote it all down. Anything urgent at that point got done. Now when new Things to do crop up they go at the end of the list, where they are soon crossed off again if urgent or maybe stay for a while if they seem less urgent or less appealing than other ongoing projects. The length of the list never drops below about 80, and never rises much above 105.
It's a system, and it works for me, though I have never seen it advocated by any lifestyle guru. I don't mind being reminded that the quantity of things I could usefully do is far greater than the number of things I am actually going to do. I know that anyway. I find the list a handy memory jogger, that I will need to prune the vine before the end of winter (so I had better get on with it), or that I meant to move a gentian that has failed to flourish to a position with more light to see if it does better, or that I need to write up the beekeepers' accounts, or will have to buy fence posts before I can mend the fence in the meadow. Ticking off a big job gives a sense of satisfaction, as does deleting anything in the top 30 because they've been there the longest.
Today while it was raining I put the wax foundation in the last of some brood frames I made up months ago. Without the list I might not even have remembered that they were sitting in the spare room waiting to be done, since it's very easy not to think about beehive frames until the point in the season where you need some urgently and realise you've run out. That was number 42 on the list, which was about right since I had no immediate need for the finished frames, but will probably want them at some point between April and August.
Some jobs disappear of their own accord if left for long enough, and others get deleted because having thought I wanted to do them, on mature reflection I decide I don't. Getting hold of a photograph of myself for the beekeepers' website that was not totally and utterly hideous fell into the first category, since I'm stepping down from the committee so they no longer need a photo. Making wooden tripods for a couple of the shrub roses fell into the second, since once I'd looked at them long and hard I decided I would simply prune them more severely.
Completionists would find the whole system infuriating.
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