MUD,SWEAT AND TEARS

The backyard of The Hits radio host Hayley Bath’s dreams hasn’t begun quite as she intended.

When I first started planning our backyard renovation, I pictured a green oasis – a nice, flat lawn in the middle, surrounded by beautiful trees and lush, tropical garden beds.

Instead, I’ve got a 700m2 mud pit with digger tread marks all through it, a shredded tyre on the trailer, piles of green waste that are somehow taller than the original trees and some serious trauma. Oh, and did I mention that the car is currently stuck in the mud on the lawn? At this stage, I’ve given up any hope of getting it out. I’ll put a sprinkler on top of it and call it a permanent water feature.

My spirit has almost been broken, and we’re only halfway through the work, so in case you get lured into the idea of landscaping your own backyard, I’ve decided to walk you through what I’ve learned so far.

When you’re a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of person, you need to marry someone patient.

Bless my hubby, he’s the most patient man on Earth. He knows by now that when I get the idea to do a little bit of weeding on a Sunday, it’ll turn into a big project that dominates our next 10 weekends. Like the calm hero he is, he sighed, pulled on his gloves, followed me outside and somehow didn’t roll his eyes when I started looking around, feeling inspired.

When you plan to work outside, a thunderstorm will roll in. It’s Murphy’s Law.

I pictured sunshine, I got a storm, complete with lightning strikes, but when you’re working towards a deadline because trees need to be planted and grass needs to be sown at the right time of year, you’ve just got to carry on. Trees had to be chainsawed, green waste hauled off into a mulch pile and trailer-loads of dirt brought in to keep our project on track. The digger battled on through the rain, leaving behind a sodden mess, alongside the car stuck on the lawn after I’d held my own bogan car rally, doing skids in the mud trying to get it out.

You shouldn’t burn ponga logs.

I learned this the hard way. I thought we’d have a lovely little brazier campfire and maybe also a singalong while getting rid of the ponga trunk. Nature said, “Nope.” The ponga combusted spectacularly, sending kids running away screaming and embers sailing high into the air towards land filled with toetoe plants nearby. I suddenly realised those fluffy plants are essentially highly flammable tinder on sticks. A quick Google confirmed you shouldn’t burn ponga for exactly this reason. Oops.

The tramping boots you bought 10 years ago will finally be used.

Tramping is a form of torture, something I hadn’t realised when I shelled out for a new pair of boots 10 years ago, convinced I’d become an elite hiker who relished the blisters, mosquito bites and heartburning sensation of being out of breath. I went on one tramp, then shamefully shoved the boots into the back of a cupboard, swearing never again, but when the thunderstorm washed out my gumboots, the hiking boots came out. They now sit proudly outside my back door, sporting a satisfyingly a worn-in look and no longer screaming, “Tramping queen failure!” at me when I see them.

Measure the distance between the trees before you buy the hammock.

tend to get overexcited and am much more interested in the finished result than the actual process. Before our backyard is even complete, I’m already decorating it. A two-person hammock was purchased without checking the measurements. When this behemoth hammock arrived, I realised it was actually bigger than the gap between the two trees I planned to hang it between. Never mind. I’ll simply plant another pōhutukawa tree and wait 10 years for it to mature so it can hold the other end of the hammock.

I don’t have time to relax anyway.

Is there hope in this chaos? Will this mud pit eventually turn into the green oasis I envisaged? If it doesn’t, I’ve considered buying a few pigs, releasing them into the backyard and calling it done.

Meanwhile, the costs keep piling up, but the $1,000 I’m about to spend on this $500 backyard reno may well be the best $4,000 I’ve ever spent. At this point, the maths is beyond me. I’m just hoping the garden looks good – or the pigs are cute, at least.

Catch Hayley on The Hits 95FM, weekdays from 9am till 3pm.