Husbandry

In this our anniversary month I am posting an appreciation of my husband.

The words are related.  I consulted the Oxford Dictionary of English to confirm that husband derives from 'master of a house'; an 'occupier and tiller of the soil', and husbandry from a similar route  - the Middle English acquiring the meaning of farming.

To husband is to use resources economically.  This is second nature to my spouse.  Last weekend we emptied one of his front garden raised beds, which he made from a discarded pallet passed on by friends.  Others have been constructed from used decking and children's bunks.  The decking will soon find a place in the wood skip at the tip.  The soil is destined for our other raised beds, or to top up our compost bins, where some very energetic worms passed on by my family are doing good work.  

Be it wood or metal, it will find a home. Recently he reinforced a low place in our bottom hedge with several pieces of an old fireguard and a small ornamental metal gate.  Sheets of conservatory roofing plastic passed on by our neighbour find a new life as windbreaks and blackbird deterrents around emerging crops.

In his role as a husbandman, my man takes his responsibilities seriously.  We live in a home with shared boundaries.  He makes sure they are secure from incursion and cuts our hedges in collaboration with our neighbours, resolving the differences of opinion that will from time to time arise. 

When it comes to growing things he is the more gentle and the more decisive.  He spent many months nurturing some winter squash.  These two feeble little plants have now repaid us with an enormous yellow fruit each for Christmas.  He takes great pains with tomatoes and runner beans and has learned how to freeze the latter.  He takes time over soil preparation and weeding where I am impulsive and quick.  When he prunes roses, another skill he learned as a very young man, he is ruthless against blackspot.  He cut our red rose right back, as I posted earlier, but now both it and our smaller pink one are growing strongly.  

I may or may not get a new rose for our anniversary, but I am delighted to live with the good husbandry of my husband.

Back to the base

 Our back garden, though rain battered, gives me great pleasure, particularly V's rose which is now in its 'second flush'.  Our smaller pink rose is awaiting heavy cutting back from my husband and our third rose, the scented red one, is not visible at present from our back patio window.  But it is still there.

During our first summer here, nearly nine years ago, clematis Broughton Star was rampaging along the fence and up into the hawthorn hedge at our boundary.  Peeping through this tangled mass were the blossoms of a red climbing rose.  The first step in its preservation was to cut back the clematis.  My husband has done this at least twice now but, in general, clematis Broughton Star is a resilient plant, and continues to twine itself around a holly bush which it would be impracticable to dig out.

His next move was to buy three large wooden stakes in an attempt to support the rose.  This was not completely to my liking (although I did not say so at the time).  The rose swayed its way along the fence aided by a triangle of stakes and wires.

This year marked a decisive moment.  My husband removed the stakes which are now helping to corral our blackcurrant bushes and announced that he was going to cut the rose right back.  It was suffering from blackspot and this was the only remedy.  

It was not exactly the right time of year to do this (although I did not say so at the time) and he left about two feet of one stem.  I had a few anxious weeks.  He assured me that the stem was still green and the rose was not dead. Throughout the really hot weather he watered it.

He was proved right.  Our rose is sending up dark red shoots from the single stem and from the base above its graft exactly as described in a gardening magazine passed on to me by J.  By August, as predicted in the article,  these should have reached a decent size.  Next year I hope it will bloom again.

Still Life in Shed

I have taken up drawing half a century after my 'O' Level in Art.  On a warm summer day I remember cutting a spray of fragrant white mock orange blossom to carry in to my high school examination hall.  Flowers I could sketch with a modicum of success.  It helped that Miss G. our art teacher knew the appropriate technique.

Now I have started again inspired by a two hour free course at our local library put on by Lancashire Adult Learning.  I tried not to glance at my classmates who were making rapid and competent sketches of their mobile phones and spectacles.  I did attempt my glucose reader, assuming that this everyday shape would be easy.  My difficulty arose as much from my emotional reactions to my glucose levels as from my inability to free draw a rectangle.

Nothing daunted I have borrowed an excellent guide (which I am allowed to renew eight times) and purchased a sketch book and a set of artist's materials.  I have decided on the representation of everyday objects around me.  Into my third renewal and somewhere around page 7 of this exhaustive paperback I am still mastering rectangles, shading, proportion and perspective.  

It was ambitious to attempt a corner of the shed.  The flowerpots are reasonable - I have been practising ellipses; the timbers of the shed are recognisable; the spade looks as if it has been handled by one of Tolkien's dwarfs.  

I wish I had paid more attention to Miss G.  But I shall carry on with my roll call of the familiar which at present means more rectangles, namely the 1950s chairs that match our family dining table, the 1950s piano stool which we found in a charity shop near Much Hoole, and the red plastic kick stool passed on to us by Mrs F, a gardening customer, where I regularly stand to inspect my baking.

If I could distil two maxims from my sketching experience to date they would read:

'Draw what is there - not what isn't there.'  I have been particularly challenged by the finely turned wooden legs of 1950s furniture.

and

'Draw whatever endears itself to you'. 

Sometimes I am satisfied with a even one accurate minor detail like the bent corner on a paperback copy of 'The Lord of the Rings' - another perspective exercise where three books are piled aslant.

So it is fitting to let Tolkien have the last word on this.  If f you have never read it look up his short story; a meditation on creativity, life and art in 'Leaf by Niggle'.

Sparrow's nest

Sparrow populations are declining nationally so we are making a small contribution towards a healthier population.  They have nested under our front bay window and are feeding their fledglings on the aphids they have picked from our raspberries and blackcurrants.  As I have previously noted, we do not use pesticides.  Male and female birds take it in turns to fly up to the nest to a chorus of chirpings.  We are waiting for them to quit the nest before we finish cutting the front privet hedge and last week dissuaded our neighbour's gardener from taking power tools to the top.  (We love these charming creatures, but have still taken the precaution of netting our garden peas, given their taste for sweet pea shoots.)

We share our home with bumblebees who have nested in various crannies, and even last year with wasps.  June's RHS magazine features the wide variety of solitary wasps who act as an environmentally friendly pest control.  Ours were the social wasps (Vespula vulgaris).  I hope that wherever they have nested this year they also will be consuming aphids.  There were no ill effects - the wasps had to be dissuaded from entering the house towards the end of their life span but we were never stung.

Cactus Flower

We celebrated my husband's birthday last summer with a patio party for neighbours and one kind gift was a spiny little cactus, labelled 'sunny cactus'.  On closer examination the bright yellow flowers positioned at the top of each three cacti proved to be artificial.  We removed these with a pair of small pliers and disposed of them.  The cactus then sat on a sunny windowsill, as advised.

Last month I noticed that our cactus, which appears to go by the common name of Powder Puff Cactus or botanically Mammillaria had produced pointed buds which subsequently opened into a cluster of pink flowers.  

My next challenge is to sketch it.  I had the opportunity of a free two-hour adult education drawing class at our local library and have subsequently bought a sketch pad and pencils.  The book I have borrowed takes me right back to the basics drawing squares and circles free hand.  I need to progress to ellipses, starting with glass tumblers, before I can hope to draw the cactus and the pot it sits in. 

Unlike artificial flowers, real flowers blossom and fade.  I hope I have time to do this.

Tubers

It is now a month since I planted Charlotte, our second early potatoes and they are doing well.  Each morning before breakfast I go out into the back garden to look at them.  The ones in the sunnier spot will eventually need earthing up, the overflow others are a little slower.

In addition to our potatoes we now have Jerusalem Artichokes.  These 'random' plants were emerging in an unfilled bed in our home-made compost.  At first I thought they were weeds, then we dug up the tubers or part tubers.  A wild suggestion of sweet potatoes was discounted and we identified them; one white tuber at least looks like Fuseau.  We acquired free artichokes on our allotment too after other plot-holders had composted the remains of their crops.

I have fond memories of Jerusalem Artichokes although they are not to everyone's taste.  In challenging times I used to curry them with various pulses or turn them into soup.  In the autumn they will retail in our local emporium at a price that reflects their status as a delicacy.  

My husband has reminded me that once you grow them they are almost impossible to remove.  At the moment we have three.  They have been confined to a sunny spot in the same bed as our runner beans.  

Roses

Rose planting is not to be rushed.  I have conceded this after visiting two garden centres with my husband.  I had the idea that we could transform the small patio area behind our forsythia 'hedge' into a rose bed in readiness to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III.  I could visualise us sitting there with our near neighbours, drinking tea and eating cake.  

That was the idea, but the truth is that roses take time.  The only ones available were in pots and seemed to be for special occasions.  The clue was in their names, variations on 'silver years', 'golden years' and 'lovely nannas'.  It so happens that this year for us too is a celebratory one, but that is no excuse for impulse buying.

My husband learned his craft working for a rose grower and nurseryman and he knows that the proper season to plant roses is the autumn.  Roses come 'bare-rooted' which means we should order them from a nursery and they will arrive securely wrapped to help them overcome the strain of being dug up, minus soil, from their native field.  He knows this, because one of his early jobs was digging them up.

So it is October then.  This gives us the rest of the time to enjoy the daffodils and then put them in pots over the summer to die down and then replant; to let the wallflowers flower and then finish; to stop treating this area as an overflow bed where we, actually, I, stick things that I do not want to throw away.  Then it is over to my husband with the digging and enriching of our clay soil with plenty of manure.

Marriage takes time.  Preparation makes it worthwhile.  Impulsive actions rarely work.

Bank Holiday Potatoes

 Rain is steadily falling on the Second Early seed potatoes that we planted over the 2023 Easter Weekend.  It leads me to reflect on gardening at home.  The last time I can remember buying seed potatoes was probably twelve or so years ago, returning from a trip, possibly to Epping Forest.  We stopped off somewhere near Loughton and hastily bought a bag of seed potatoes that was stickered  - they were growing through the plastic mesh of the bag.  I think they were maincrop Rooster, they were definitely red skinned.  We had a bed on the allotment in mind, but it was a rather hasty job as they needed to go in as quickly as possible.  They did well and we got a crop.

What a difference a decade makes.  This time our potatoes had an allocated spot in their own planter constructed by my husband, and there was also overflow space in one of his other planters - one row alongside our overwintering onions.  We both agreed that we would purchase 'Charlotte' and went to our local garden centre for a bag of 25 seed potatoes.  We chitted them in the garage in egg boxes for several weeks until they sprouted, and we also held back half a dozen for R around the corner as experience has taught me that overcrowding limits the fruitfulness of a crop.

When we both considered it was warm enough we put them in, following the instructions on the bag.  My husband made me a measuring stick so I could space them at the correct distance and pulled up the soil into ridges so they could go on top.   Then we covered them.

Now comes the business of waiting for them to grow and earthing them up until it is time to harvest.  The instructions on the bag indicate that this could be between July and September.  I do hope it proves to be July, as we have earmarked one planter for a variety of blue-green pumpkin/winter squash from saved seed via our neighbour's allotment and the other for cucumbers or French Beans when the onions are ready.  

This is gardening intensively, intense cropping, and we hope, intense flavours to follow.

Forsythia

 I have learned in nearly twenty five years of marriage that it is not a good idea to rush my husband into precipitate action.  That is why we have two forsythia bushes sitting in capacious blue supermarket planters on our front drive.  They are waiting to go into the two holes in the front shrubbery that he dug last week.  

In a replay of our gardening days we went around the corner to J's house on Monday and he dug up two good sized ones and a further two that J had chopped away at.  This happens when we are minded to dispose of a plant we don't like but J refrained from the final blow and these latter are destined to be hidden the wildlife glade in the park.

The weather on Monday also reminded us of the occasions when we had a fine period to accomplish a task.  The wind blew continuously, soughing in the trees, but the rain did not come until my husband had tidied up, cleaned the paving stones, patched in bits of turf and helped J to load the bushes wrapped in a plastic sheet into the back of her car.  J offered to pay us but we declined.

Then it was home and into the two blue pots he had prepared earlier.  The aim is gradually to replace the wind-scorched yellow privet at the front with forsythia - both the full grown ones we acquired this week and the cuttings we took from the bushes  we planted behind the shed in the glade when we arrived.  Had we thought, back then in 2014, we could have re-used the rather straggly forsythia that was growing along the wall where we now have our blackcurrants grown from cuttings.  But then, as J remarked, we were not to know that.

Muscari

Muscari are a rather nondescript kind of spring bulb that, according to my husband, proliferate.  He was occasionally asked to root them up.  Our muscari were planted in our front beds last year.  As is often the case, they were passed on to us.  It seems that someone gave our friend the gift of a box with a shiny silvery bowl, a small plastic bag of compost and several muscari bulbs.  I explained to her that it was the wrong time of year (some time after Christmas) to plant them and that they were unlikely to flower indoors.  But I took them off her hands.  

I popped them in, out of season, last year and they produced leaves in late spring/early summer.  This year I am gratified to see that they are flowering at the right time.  Somehow the botanical clock inside these bulbs, connected to daylight hours and warmth, has reset itself and prompted them to produce cones of little blue flowers.  

Meanwhile, my husband is out in the front shrubbery preparing for some Forsythia we have been promised.  Again, not the most suitable time of year to dig these shrubs out from a friend's around the corner and translocate them.  But this is what we do.