Sure, I'm drinking alone just after midday but my aching body deserves this treat after an energetic morning fertilizing and watering the rather sad winter garden, spraying the patio couches with some chemical protectant and planting tomatoes and garlic in the kitchen garden.
A new house means beginning the veggie garden all over again, which is OK but I have to fit it in between several out of town trips. Experience has taught that gardens need regular love and care, not the slap dash all-or-nothing approach that is my wont.
A chemical protectant has no place in a Lightly Green blog, and is a desperate last resort. Note to empty nesters out there - once the sprogs leave home don't give in to the interior design mags and splurge on a wicker patio suite with puffy winter white cushions. They aren't under siege from toddler chocolate fingers or teenage sneakers, but as some distinct, clear-as-the-mud-they-were-formed-from paw prints reveal, Speckle and Egg love the new furniture as well.
Which reminds me of a funny story involving Senior Son and a Christmas cake. When he was 4, I'd baked a Christmas cake and flood-iced it with a charming picture of Father Christmas about to descend a chimney. Flood icing, for the uninitiated, involves tracing the picture outlines in hard icing, then colouring some soft Royal icing which is squeezed into the outlines until the meniscus holds it within the boundaries and the picture is filled. Leaving the handiwork to harden, I attended nappy duty on Junior son and returned to find a neat, finger poked hole in FC's boot. "Who did that?" I demanded. "Tai Chi" answered Senior Son. Tai Chi, our long haired black-as- night cat, the unfriendliest feline on Planet Earth who'd pretty much left home when Son 1 arrived and made it her task to ensure she never, ever, was in the same room as the boys. "Hmm, it doesn't look like her paw print, let me get Tai Chi and see if her paw fits". A brilliant tactic, if I say so myself, as it elicted an immediate confession that no, it wasn't the cat, it was actually him!
Getting back to Sunday morning, with the jolly couch spraying task done, I turned my sights to planting out some garlic cloves and tomato seeds in the kitchen garden. Moving heaps of discarded Virginia creeper leaves from the garden bed was backbreaking work because of the blasted tonnes of white pebbles some halfwit landscaper had filled the bed with. Who deposits layers of pebbles, at a guess over 100kg's worth, beneath a Virginia creeper which rejoices at the approach of winter by shedding every leaf it can, opening up for the birds to move in and nibble at the berries? All this would-be mulch sat sulkily on top of the pebbles, wasted and not doing what it should do - mulch the bed.
The rake and broom having no effect but thinking longingly of the leaf blowers I sneer at created a light bulb moment - I DO have a hairdryer. Digging it out of the cupboard, setting up adapters and extension cables and reading the instructions to find the cold setting - eureka, it works! Ok, not like the professional jobs but how thrilling to watch the leaves blowing up into the air and off the stones. Success!
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| Someone was enjoying the leaves! |
Following the instructions posted on www.gardenate.com, once the leaves were banished and the stones removed, 7 plump garlic cloves were placed pointy end up, covered in worm vermicast and rewarded with some water. Is there a reader who has mastered the trick of retrieving vermicast from their worm farm? I've tried spreading it out on newspapers in the sun, creating a pyramid so the worms wiggle down at the bottom as instructed - fail! And it's so time consuming to rescue all the worms from the vermicast as I dig it out and then in. The baby worms are especially stupid and don't realise that the sunlight and activity means they should shoo down as low as they can go. Darwin Awards are all very well, but I'm fond of my worms, they work hard and deserve saving.
Another tip picked up from the garlic planting page at Gardenate is NOT to use garlic cloves bought in a supermarket, but try and source them from friends / community growers. The garlic we buy in-store has been treated and may sprout, if lucky, but that is all. If you want green swathes of pungent garlic, you need organic, heirloom or homegrown from a friend cloves.
Luckily, my cloves came from Louise Williamson, who proudly pressed some of her first garlic crop on us when Kate and I visited so the heritage of my garlic cloves is first rate. Ditto the small yellow and mini red tomatoes sourced from Rowena at Fountains Farm. The crop is sure to be wonderful and I can't wait.
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