Nice one, Cyril

A catchphrase, strapline, ditty, call it what you will, that will mystify the young.  However, I am not thinking of football....topical as it is at present.

Cyril, possibly with a K is the name of a strawberry, and this is another rescue story.  Some surplus strawberry plants were growing in a customer's garden, asked for, disentangled from the long grass, and taken to the plot.  We were told they were Russian and hardy.  Several years later this has proved true.  Even in the rainy conditions we are experiencing they have ripened in intermittent sunshine and are large and tasty.  Now they are sending out runners that we can propagate for the next generation.

Cyril is not a name for little boys nowadays but it has a distinguished history.  In the ninth century Cyril devised an alphabet for the Slavonic peoples, based on the Greek one, translated the Gospels, and with his brother Methodius wrote them in the new script.  Faith - transplanted from Byzantium to Bulgaria, growing in new soil.  Keep giving it away.

Prized (2) Penstemons

This weekend was the first show of the season and I looked around the plot for flowers.  Flowers only is the tradition here for the first show - no veg. and no home baking. 

We only had two exhibits and I am pleased to record they both gained second prize.  Once again they had been rescued.  The penstemons, which flowered a month early, were hauled out by customers who wanted to redesign a bed, taken and replanted next to our shed.  They needed a fair amount of cossetting and cutting back before they recovered from such a translocation.  But they are tough hardy perennials and came back into bloom in a shade that might be called an icy, minty purple. 

Likewise the non-bearded iris - large yellow and cream blooms.  They are prolific, common to this area and our customer was bored with them.  We dug them up from her front garden and replanted them in a large recycled rubber tyre.  They won second prize in their category (for the second time).

At the end of the show I bid 40p in the auction and came home with a huge bunch of flowering shrubs, honeysuckle and roses.  The scent of the mock-orange blossom is now filling our living room.

That sinking feeling

Plodded down to the plot in rubber boots to check the flooding.  The heads of clover and common daisies were six inches underwater in some places, swaying as if transformed into seaweed.  My onions are surrounded by a moat.  I hope they do not rot off. 

The soil where I attempt to weed is viscous, muddy.  We have been making mounds of compost and horse manure, building it up year by year, but hungry vegetables seem to eat as much as we can load on and then the level sinks once more.  There is a process of constant replenishment.

So much water has fallen that our apple trees sit healthily on little islands above the sodden grass. 

Bamboozling the pigeons

Tidiness was paramount - as you can tell from my previous blog.  I used to wonder why other people left tall meadow grass around their gooseberries and did not cut out a nice little tidy circle at the base of each bush.  Now I know better.

Pigeons do not have many brain cells, in my opinion.   They like to go for the obvious.  Bright redcurrants or ripe gooseberries are an invitation, as is the bed of cabbage seedlings that I planted out and netted on Tuesday.  Netting everything is fiddly.  One day we may be able to afford fruit cages.  But in the meantime I am wondering is there a virtue in untidiness if it deters the pigeons?  Grass is growing around my gooseberries and redcurrants.  Strawberries are sheltered by mare's tail, a weed that I particularly detest.  But let's see if it works. 

At the margins

Last year I cut out three beds for winter squash and courgettes.  The plan was that these frost-tender plants would grow in the shelter of the blackberry hedge against a backdrop of tall purple malvas.  This year I have only one planned vegetable bed. 

A gift of honeysuckle has spread all over the first bed mixed in with the native wildflowers.  (I hesitate to call them weeds).  Slowly and surely it is finding its way to the metal fence.  The malvas have completely taken over the third bed.  Nettles and convolvulus poke in profusion up from the weed heaps in the hedge which should be slowly turning into compost.  In the remaining middle bed I have sweetcorn.

Once, I would wanted to maximise every inch, and spent time weeding and weeding.  Now, as long as the weeds and wildflowers remain the other side of the boards holding in the compost piles I am content to let them be.  Experts spend time researching permaculture, garden design experts plant in swathes and batches, I have the margins - a corridor for wildlife, a sunbathing spot for cats, food plants for caterpillars, nectar for bees. I have a profusion at the margins.

Celebrating the Queen Bee

The bee I have in mind is small, furry and rotund - the bumblebee that chose to make its nest in our communal compost heap. 

I had seen the occasional bee going in and out of the unwieldy pile that is our communal heap, the site of my digging and sieving for several months.  But now all this activity has to cease.  Bees are nesting in it.  There is probably more than one queen marked out by the distinctive white patch on her 'tail' raising her larvae amid the twigs and sticks.  Protective adult bees came out in noisy but peaceful protest, buzzing around us when we tried to dig out some compost at the weekend.  So now my handwritten notice proclaims that they are 'busy and beneficial' and to be left to complete their job in peace.

Much the same could be said for our monarch - may God bless her.