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Tag: garden

Starting point. End point for today:

There has been lopping and sawing and cutting.

One of the mini-greenhouses was smashed beyond repair. I’ll finish assembling one single mini-greenhouse out of parts from two tomorrow. I got slowed down by discovering other jobs that needed doing along the way. All four apple trees are unexpectedly fruiting, so they needed weeding and mulching.

And, shockingly, the cherry tree is fruiting. I thought this was one of the figs at first, because I didn’t expect the cherry to live. I double checked with the plant app and it seems to be the cherry!

I also needed to attend to the berry plants – the strawberries are already starting to fruit. Seems I lost a few raspberry canes, and the peaches are probably beyond saving – they came out of dormancy too early so I couldn’t repot them, then they bloomed in fucking February, then it got cold again, and now they are confused and want to die. I intended to write tomorrow, but I need to repot some raspberry canes very fast, and some chives – just hoping I have enough compost left — and then feed everything.

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My first apples
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Copper scourers arrived. Cheap ones. They’re basically scrunched-up tubes of copper wire. What you do is take a pair of shears and cut the tubes into hoops. The hoops fit around plant pots. Slugs and snails hate copper. Sometimes they can get around copper tape. They’re going to loathe these hoops of scratchy copper wire.

Also assembled and hung hat racks.

I note this to pretend I’m being productive when in fact nobody wants me to concentrate on work and I’ve done maybe a paragraph in the last hour.

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The Organic Gardening Catalogue were having a flash sale, and I picked up nine bare-root raspberry canes for seven quid. Right now, they’re dunked in a bucket of rainwater. The sun doesn’t go down until 7.59pm tonight, so I should have plenty of time to plant them out.

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And that cherry tree I planted yesterday flowered today.

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Garden notes 7apr24

First thing today, I was up and out and running the garden shredder for an hour.

These pots are deep, I’ve run out of homemade compost and bags of shop-bought are getting pricey again. So I drop some old pots on the bottom for drainage and taking up some volume, and then half-fill with wood chips. I’m also out of Perlite, so I scatter a couple handfuls of grit in there.

Golden Harvest mange tout, germinated and raised in one of the mini-greenhouses, in these very handy re-useable plug pots.

I like the old fashioned tools. Probably down to having watched Jack Hargreaves’ OUT OF TOWN every weekend as a kid. Handling them is part of the meditative pleasure of garden work for me.

All in, bamboo wigwam inserted, some extra rows of twine for support, netting tied in over the top for plant support and hopefully deterring the squirrels.

We will see if they all immediately die. But I got plenty of air and sun (and three thousand steps) doing all that, and that’s really the goal. Peaceful couple of hours.

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Garden notes 6apr24

And by garden we mean BOMB SITE

This year has been nothing but high gales and heavy rain.

And millions of seeds blown in by the storms and then watered in by the bloody rain.

A lot of these weeds are garlic mustard, which is a quaint old name for what is basically THE CYANIDE PLANT OV DEATH.

Anyway.

This broken old mini greenhouse has been righted, put and tied down, with string trellis supports suspended inside.

Redcurrant and cherry put in the ground.

Golden berry and cape gooseberry that I overwintered undercover have been planted out, and tomatoes started indoors have been potted up – one is a variety called Blue Pear that I’m interested to see what happens with.

Cleaned and top dressed the blueberries , did the same with some of the raspberries, emptied a compost bin, dug out a ton of weeds (three tons still to do), started refilling the empty compost bin. Got about half of what I wanted to get done, done, but half is better than none.

Weeding is bullshit.

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Amid the junk at the top of the garden: new spade and fork arrived. One with an absurdly sticky label. I find myself amassing a lot of tools. I try to pick up things that are multipurpose, but my spade snapped last week when I was burying a chicken, and my garden fork went missing years ago and it’s murder trying to turn a compost bin with a spade.

I’ve had six or seven deliveries today and am on the verge of giving up work for the day. I really want to be out there digging, cutting and rebuilding.

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Let’s see how these guys do outside.

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And, after a few hours of washing, scrubbing, soaking, pouring and cutting, the propagator is up. Zativa peppers, bell peppers, thyme, tomatoes. I’ll have to run the heater for a few hours at night for a while, but in two weeks I should either have plants or dead chunks of wet coir.

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