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How the weather isn’t.
I should have been at the garden today. The beds need weeding again, and I’ve not had a chance to unleash the newly sharpened scythe on the brambles (although a trial swing in the veggie beds went through several varieties of weed and the side of a compost bin), the seedings are finally growing to a point they can be planted out and there are more steps to be dug than I want to think about, and I’m sitting in here with the rain beating on the skylight behind me like a British boarding house on a bank holiday weekend.
Usually the spring rain falls so hard the runoff on the roof pours so fast it misses the guttering altogether and pours straight on the garden below, then clears up by the time you’ve finished your bike ride*. This weekend we’ve had constant rain: heavy, light, and by way of variation this afternoon, angled. There’s no point going to the garden in this weather as the shed leaks and the clay soil will glue to the spade leaving it useful only as a club to beat the weeds with. I know I keep going on about this, but I really need some reliable, comfortable shelter in the garden. I’m working on that, admittedly painfully slowly, but hopefully I’ll soon have some progress soon.
I’ve spent most of the day helping Eldest Son with a history of Hamburg, and sketching woodwork projects. I’ve discovered that dovetails are part of the test in a few weeks and my final project in 2015, so I really need to get some practice, which means ordering some wood at work, which means working out what I need.
I’ve also been wondering -in that melancholy way you do when the rain is hitting the window- about what to write about next: I can’t go cycling or gardening and a sane person can only take so much information about woodwork. I’ve lived here and this way so long I don’t really know what is interesting to someone looking in through these web pages.
Please give suggestions below. Or expect more entries about the weather.
*Usually about five minutes before you get back…
So here’s the Very Smallholding. it may look as if I’m doing nothing but I’ve at least managed to get some of the weeding done*, with some help from my parents who came to visit and brought a nice stainless steel fork as a late Christmas present. If that wasn’t a hint to get moving I don’t know what is.
Last year I planted almost everything at once and ended up with a million leuttices**, half a tonne of courgettes and enough cannonball sized kohl rabi to reenact the battle of Waterloo.
Most of this, unfortunately, ended up in the compost bin: we only have so many neighbours who need seven courgettes a week.
The plan this year is to make smaller batches and plant each week. I’ve started to plant seeds in my usual home-made paper pots, but I’ll also be planting more seeds directly into the garden. Smaller things and salads will mostly stay on the balcony in the earthboxes I made a couple of years ago.
Thanks to The Boys and their friends running up and down the hill last summer, it looks like I won’t need to clear a way through the brambles as much this year, although some steps will be needed. Getting to the bottom of the garden is easy enough, if muddy.
Getting up again causes problems.
The monster tree at the bottom of the garden. The general opinion is that this is a pear tree. Unless it is apple.
I’m still working out a way to get this up and out of the garden so I can dry it properly and use it for something other than firewood.
*Pre-weeding view here.
**Still can’t spell ‘Lettices’.
One of the most common plants in our garden is the ash tree, Fraxinus Exclesior, a fast growing native hardwood. The owner of the garden loathes them, but I’m letting them grow just about wherever they chose to self-seed, or wherever the bird poo carrying them lands. I’m doing this because I like them, and because they grow fast and give good quality wood which I may be able to use in three years, but also because recently a fungus called Chalara fraxinea has come from goodness knows where and seems to like eating them. Alarming numbers of ash trees are dying off all over Germany.
Until February this year there was some hope that the UK would be spared: as long as no ash trees from the continent were brought in the fungus may not make it over the channel. Unfortunately no-one told the politicians this (or if they did, the politicians didn’t want to hear it) so they allowed the trees to be imported and exported, and Chalara fraxinea turned up as well. In several places.
The brilliant minds of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), formed ‘Emergency Committee Cobra’ which has come up with such gems as “everyone should be responsible”. and advise people visiting forests in the UK to “Wash your hands afterwards“. Thanks for that.
According to this very comprehensive post on the Ubiqitous Blog this is nothing new: scientists have been repeatedly ignored when their concerns may inconvenience some corporate interest, and one who was asked to investigate a similar fungal attack on trees in a park had a gagging order placed on them to prevent them saying where the outbreak may have come from.
At the same time, the Environment Secretary (who supports a third runway at Heathrow, a badger cull and fracking, but dislikes wind farms, just as an aside) has suggested that the current outbreak of fungus causing ash dieback is ‘possibly just wind borne’, which is interesting because two weeks ago a forester in Germany old me no-one is sure how the fungus spores are transported.
Which would mean that in the UK, a scientist commissioned to investigate an outbreak of fungal based dieback cannot publish his or her findings for fear of legal repercussions, but a politician known to support corporate interests over the environment can make statements which happen to match up with the desires of the industry to keep going as usual, and that’s okay.
Is this a very strange situation, or am I missing something?
[Edit: Check the comments. It appears Ash seeds are wind blown rather than carried by birds. Thanks Kim.]
Last week we had a village festival and were all walking about in shirt sleeves; this morning I opened the shutters and…
Winter just arrived. At least you know where you are with the seasons here, even if they do make us jump.
Beautiful sunrise too.
Not being a spreadsheet minded person I can’t give the full, in depth, results of the garden, but I can report that although the carrots came out interesting shapes and most of the Kohlrabi turned out like cannonballs in taste and texture, we won’t ever be short of aubergines this winter. The potatoes did pretty well too: Being of a lazy disposition, I’d planted them in the ‘no dig’ beds in the hope that they would break the soil down nicely and for once my cunning plan worked. The resulting spuddies tasted good as well, so next year I’ll be getting a few more kilos*, and use them to break down the beds where the courgettes and pumpkins clobbered the weeds this year. Collecting the order from the farmers shop will involve climbing up the Hill of Doom with bike full of seed potatoes, which I suspect will generate a blog entry in itself.
The other goal of the year was to start collecting seeds, so to this end I deliberately avoided F1 varieties (cross bred plants which are meant to combine the best properties of both previous plants) as apparently the advantages don’t last to the next generation, and last week I started drying out the seeds while I still can and getting them ready to store for next year. This is my excuse for why several lettuces and most of the spinach have bolted: it’s so I can collect the seeds, honest, not because I was in the UK and then too sloppy to harvest the things.
The flip side of this cunning plan is of course that I can only collect seeds from what grew well, so if I want any French beans, basil, or tomatoes, I’ll have to order them, whereas I have enough seeds to grow more yellow courgettes than any right thinking person would ever want…
*Obviously I can’t remember what variety they are. What do you take me for, a proper gardener?
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