On Sunday I stood at the back doors looking out at a grey, damp garden for forty-five minutes, and found every reason not to go out into it. In the end, the television drove me out. This week is about that doorstep, and what was waiting on the other side of it.

"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each."

— Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1853

On grey days, and the hardest step in the garden (7 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

On Sunday the sky over the back garden sat low and grey, the colour of a dishcloth that has been through the wash too many times. It wasn't raining, not properly. It was damp: the kind of day where the wet seems to hang in the air rather than fall through it, and everything outside looks as though it has been left out overnight. From the bi-fold doors, the borders had gone flat. The lawn had gone dark. Nothing out there looked as if it wanted company.

I stood at the glass and looked at the bed I'd been meaning to weed for a week, and I did not go and weed it.

I stood there for forty-five minutes.

Not all in one go. I'd drift away, do something that didn't need doing, and drift back, and the garden would still be grey, and the bed would still need weeding, and I would still be on the wrong side of the glass. I had reasons, if you can call them that. It was damp. It might rain. The weekend was nearly over. I was warm. Not one of them would have stood up if somebody had asked me to say it out loud.

In the end it wasn't willpower that got me out. It was the television. Olivia and Cody had settled on something I'll generously describe as rubbish, and the noise of it had been building behind me the whole time I'd been looking out at the quiet. At some point the living room got louder than the weather. I put my boots on.

I'd like to tell you I chose the garden. The truth is the telly chose it for me.

What the glass doesn't let through

The first thing was the air.

I felt it on my face before I'd taken three steps from the door: cool and damp and fresh, the opposite of the air inside a house on a Sunday with two children and a television in it. It is the one thing a window can't show you. From inside, a grey day is all about how it looks, and how it looks is flat and colourless and finished. Outside, it has a texture. You feel it on your cheeks, you breathe it in, and it isn't unpleasant at all. It woke me up.

Five minutes in, I was enjoying myself.

Five minutes. Forty-five deciding, and five to find out I'd been wrong.

I knelt at the edge of the bed and started pulling, and for an hour nobody needed anything from me. Nobody asked where something was, or what was for tea, or whether they could have five more minutes of the programme. It was just me, the weeds and the grey. Somewhere in that first quarter of an hour I noticed my thoughts had stopped going round in circles and started coming one at a time, then fewer, then mostly just the next weed. That is the best way I can describe it. The garden didn't fix anything. It gave my head somewhere quieter to sit.

What damp clay is good for

Here is the thing I hadn't bargained for. The weather that kept me inside for three quarters of an hour was exactly the weather the job needed.

In damp ground, a weed lets go. You take hold of it low down, right at the base where the stem meets the soil, pull slowly, and the whole thing comes up: leaves, crown, root, and a clump of wet clay hanging off the bottom. In the drought this summer, the same clay was baked so hard that pulling a weed from it was close to pointless; it snapped off at the surface and left its root behind to grow back in a fortnight. Anything with a taproot, the single thick root that plunges straight down like a dandelion's, was all but impossible.

On Sunday they slid out like corks.

There is a lesson in that I didn't go looking for. The conditions I'd been waiting out were the right conditions. The grey that made the garden look so uninviting from the house was the same grey that had kept the clay soft and workable underneath. A bright day would have felt better to step into. It would not have made the work any easier.

The asking and the pushing

I've been thinking since about why grey days are so much harder to step into than bright ones, and I think it comes down to who does the asking.

On a bright day, the garden asks. The sun comes in through the glass, the borders light up, and you're out of the door before you've really decided to go. It pulls. On a grey day it asks nothing. It sits out there, flat and quiet, and leaves the whole decision to you. There is no pull at all; there is only push, and every bit of the push has to come from inside.

We spend a great deal of our lives waiting for the pull. We wait until we feel like it, until there's a clear afternoon, until the weather turns, until the week calms down. For most of us, with work and children and a house full of noise, the week doesn't calm down. The clear afternoon doesn't come. And so the things that steady us, the walk, the hour outside, the ten minutes with our hands in the soil, get pushed further and further back, waiting for a day that invites them.

Most days in November won't invite anybody.

What I learned on Sunday, or learned again, is that all of the effort lives at the threshold. It is in the boots, the door handle, the first three steps. Once I was over it, there was nothing left to push against, and the garden took over from there. The forty-five minutes at the glass cost me far more than the hour outside ever did; one drained me, and the other gave it all back.

Chloe, my partner, has told me before that I'm in a better mood when I've had some time outside than when I've been stuck indoors all day. It is a slightly strange thing, being told something true about yourself by someone else. But she's right, and on Sunday I could feel it by the time I came back in, with clay on my knees and a clearer head than the one I took out.

A few loose ends

I promised you honesty on Thursday, so here is where things stand.

The sweet peas are in. We sowed them together, but only in six loo rolls, because six was all we had. It isn't the neat tray of them I'd pictured. It is six more sweet peas than we had last week.

We've decided against our own bonfire this year and are going to an organised one instead, which means no pile to check for hedgehogs, and one fewer job.

The ground cover for the south-facing bed is still not bought. I still can't decide. Part three of the ground cover series will wait until I have something in pots to stand in the bed and move around; there's no sense writing about plants I haven't chosen yet.

And the pumpkins. After everything I said on Thursday about dealing with them properly, the pumpkins are still sitting on the front doorstep. Another threshold I haven't quite got over.

The week ahead

The forecast for this week is more of the same: grey, mild and mostly dry, ten to twelve degrees most days. Not one of them is going to come in through the glass and ask me out.

I'll go anyway. Not for long, and not every day. Ten minutes some days, an hour if I'm lucky. I know now where the effort is, and it isn't in the garden.

The door was never heavy. It only looked it from inside.

Gary Stewart writes every week from a small garden on Norfolk clay.

No expertise, no ideal garden, just what the soil taught him that week.

Written slowly, at the speed of the garden, for people who read every word.