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Just the other day, I discovered a half-empty bottle of an energy drink placed in the euphorbia trough by one of the scaffolders. An architect friend joked, “Are you sure that’s Lucozade?” which made me see it differently.

All this is to say, the garden is in disarray. Sometimes neglect has its perks; coming back from a trip, I spotted a sunflower growing in the back corner.

Now, however, some urgent tidying is underway. Being six months pregnant, I’ve enlisted a local gardener to tackle invasive plants like a prickly weed and young tree shoots from the neighbour’s tree, while leaving the good stuff. Next, in the newly cleared patches, I’ll be sowing green manure.

Green manure are superheroes when it comes to boosting soil quality.

My gardening friend Claire has written about cover crops, as they play a key role in crop rotation for edible gardens. But, the only things I’m harvesting from my garden right now are a few scrumped apples and some hardy herbs.

My ambitions for the garden are simple and steady – and improving the soil is top of the list. To update concerned readers, the scaffold is for roof repairs, and the fences are still wobbly, but the neighbours are on board with replacing them.

Cover crops work wonders for soil health. Soil likes to be covered, which is why weeds appear. Yet by sowing vigorous crops, you can suppress weeds, bring in bees, host pest-eating creatures, and fix nitrogen.

Green manure plants aren’t always showy – though some, like certain lupin varieties and bird’s foot trefoil, have lovely blooms – but their purpose is to thrive rather than look decorative. After they’ve grown, you can dig them into the soil, cut them for compost, or leave them on the surface for worms to incorporate. The real magic happens underground.

Now is the ideal time for sowing these cold-season plants. I’ve chosen forage rye, great for clay soil, a nitrogen-lifter, vetch, and field beans.

It feels rewarding in planting seeds knowing it’s temporary – on the surface, anyway.