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.