Method of Transport

In an ideal world we would walk or cycle to each gardening job.  My husband often does so.  But daily life sometimes demands the use of our little red hatchback, gift of generous friends, registered fifteen years this month.  Yesterday it was time for the annual MOT.

I am glad to say our car passed and needed only the replacement of a light bulb in the sidelights.  We exhaled a sigh of relief and inhaled the scent of a newly-cleaned car, courtesy of the dealer.  Gone for the moment were the reminders of cat poo and fox poo, rotting leaves, grass cuttings, mud and all the detritus that accompanies this job.  The car was clean, its windows were clean inside and out.  It was a good feeling.  All is secure under the bonnet (hood for my North American readers), our new rear tyres are ready for the winter weather (thanks to other friends and a great garage in Woodford) and we are set for whatever comes next. 

Preferred method of transport - two legs or two wheels, but four wheels keep us both rolling; thank you God. 

Eats, Strims and Leaves

Bamboo - diet of pandas so we are informed - tall, elegant and invasive.  Another day, another tidy up .....

Eats - have a substantial breakfast on the day you do a clearance job.  Porage is recommended.  Make sure you keep eating digestive biscuits throughout.  Good for maintaining blood sugar levels.

Strims - I do not do machinery.  Petrol strimmers are fearsome and noisy tools.  Walk the ground.  Encourage frogs and toads into the safety zone and rake up afterwards. 

Leaves - Pick up fallen leaves and stuff them into bags.  Compost them where possible.  Strip foliage from bamboo thus providing economical home-made stakes.   Depart from owner/tenant/lodger... with a cheery smile, caching cash as you go.  Book next visit if requested.  Drive to the public amenity site, haul out sacks and let bamboo cascade over the edge of the big green container to join berberis, pyracanthra and all the seasonal trimmings.

To Daffodils

Exactly where they were found does not really matter.  The truth is that someone threw them out.  We kept the bulbs safely in the shed away from marauding rodents and others until last week when I sunk them into a selection of re-used terracotta pots, plastic bowls, planters, all the usual stuff that we get given.

I know two poems about daffodils.  Wordsworth's, The Daffodils, which I learned at school which begins I wandered lonely as a cloud... and Herrick's To Daffodils which I found in my old Victorian anthology Palgrave's Golden Treasury:  Fair daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon:

So this week, the teacher in me suggests a challenge: write about planting spring bulbs.   You could try verses in the style of Wordsworth or Herrick; you could describe going to the garden centre or the pound shop; pondering where to plant or stuffing them into spaces.  As a colleague of mine used to say - when writing descriptively use your five senses.  But PLEASE DON'T try eating them, as daffodils are poisonous.

Plant bulbs now to benefit later from your own spring memories such as Wordsworth's.  Or just write the poem.

Blackberry and Apple

My hands are still scratched for yesterday but it was worth it.  One of those days where you work hard for the customer, pruning, cutting out blackberries, mowing, strimming, weeding the patio, the lot. 

We started at the back.  Usually we start at the end nearest the house, but this time we went back to the two Bramleys to the rear.  How often I have seen trees like these in the former family homes of outer suburbia.  Old, mossy, decaying in places but still bearing fruit.  Some enterprising people have a scheme to collect and sell them on, or to make cider.  These apples had rotted in the long grass.  I hate seeing food decay.  We took what we could.

Then on to the blackberries (see my blog of 27th August Canes in the Rain).  Overripe blackberries, swollen, rotten, falling off and staining my hands purple, dry brown blackberry canes from previous years, sturdy prickly blackberry runners making for the ground and putting out clusters of roots at their tips for next year.  Part the shrubs, track them down to the ground, cut them back.  (If we pay a return visit we shall dig them out). 

Blackberries and apples, ingredients for many a crumble, summer pudding or suet pudding wrapped in cloth, steamed to perfection and served with thick cream in the days when we knew little of cholesterol and counting calories.  The jam tasting, the slow overnight dripping through suspended muslin of strained blackberry jelly.  The sharpness of apple chutney.  Motherhood and apple pie.   Good memories.

To every thing there is a season...

Travelling to my Friday course of studies in Chelmsford, I noticed that the undulating hills of Essex were clothed with brown carpets of ploughed soil.  For this is the season when we once sang We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land... Yet this post is concerned less with ploughing up than with planting afresh. 

Autumn is the traditional time for bare-rooted stock - trees and bushes.  (If you want confirmation of this, consult the RHS website which I have added to my page.)  So last week on the plot we were also doing this. 

One of the Michaelmas tasks, which I omitted to mention, was moving two donated gooseberry bushes to a permanent place.  They had been sitting in two temporary containers since the summer and now it was time to shake the soil off their roots, dig a very big hole, remove the ubiquitous couch grass roots, as best we could, and lodge them firmly in place.

I also had a chance to split and pot up some chives.  I'm not completely sure whether I should have done this (ditto the odd bits of rhubarb), but it's done now.  As the old boys on our allotment say You've two choices: grow or die.  But it is my hope that the remaining warmth of autumn days will cause our gooseberries to put down strong roots and our tough chives - remaindered some years ago by a florist -  to sink beneath the soil and then return in the spring. 

And then on to the next task, next post, our daffodils.

A Michaelmas Day morning

It was Michaelmas Day (Michael and all Angels) celebrated on 29th September.  A warm sun shone and the sky was clear.  We worked on our orchard plot in our shirt sleeves, digging over, tidying, uprooting the sweetcorn (a few kernels); clipping crimson leaves from the strawberries to make them more productive next year, pulling up runners that were too weak to survive. 

Necessary maintenance.  The plot is tidier now and better defined.  The summer stuff is gone, but leeks will swell in the coming cloudbursts and the last tomatoes ripen under glass.