So that's over for another year. The presents wrapped and unwrapped, the gargantuan lunch cooked and eaten, the Boxing Day National Hunt races run. It's not quite over, of course. The tree, greenery and lights up the stairs are still up and looking bright and sparkly, and the candles are burning on the white and red cloths on the dining table and on the mantelpiece. It will take several days to eat up all the leftovers, and most of the year to read all the books. We had a nice Christmas. I solved the dilemma of How Not to Ruin a Turkey by not having a turkey, and by letting somebody else do the cooking. Contrary to newspaper reports of how the typical family Christmas Day goes, lunch was ready within ten minutes of when the Systems Administrator said it would be, and there were no arguments. All the cats had Sheba for lunch, and the chickens had an extra handful of sultanas.
This morning I did some work in the garden. As I went to fetch my tools from the garage I noticed the first few flowers out on the Iris unguicularis under the sitting room window. The garden is very, very wet. We had another twelve millimetres of rain in the space of two hours yesterday morning. I spent my time trimming the ivy hedge around the long bed in the front garden, and cutting down herbaceous stems. The sand in the front garden has its drawbacks, mainly its complete inability to retain moisture in dry periods and almost zero natural fertility, but you can walk on it with impunity an hour after the heaviest rain. The forecast was for rain in the afternoon, and sure enough it is raining now.
The long bed is infested at its northerly end by some sort of grass with a running root. It is not so rank as twitch, but impossible to weed every scrap out where it runs into the root zones of shrubs or the ivy hedge, or disappears deep beneath the ground like a crash-diving submarine. I winkled out what I could, but will need to go around in the spring treating the new emerging leaves with glyphosate. In a properly conducted garden I suppose that such things would never gain a foothold, but in the real imperfect world they do. I don't see how you can ever keep the soil really clean of perennial weeds long term in a mixed border.
Snouts of bulb foliage are emerging all over the place. There are tulips in the gravel and daffodils down by the bog bed. The grape hyacinths try to come into leaf from autumn onwards, though I don't know why they bother, as something always eats the leaves. If I were to go and poke through the leaf litter in the ditch bed I'm sure I'd find snowdrop leaves. It makes weeding slightly more laborious, having to avoid slicing off the newly emerging tops of the bulbs, and the task of weeding seems all the more urgent, to be finished as soon as possible before plants make any more growth.
The pile of woody prunings up the bonfire site has grown vast, ominous and dripping. It needs a dry day for the SA to go up and have a burn. There are more prunings to come up from the back lawns, left over from my last gardening stint before rain and pre-Christmas housework took over. The vine round the vegetable patch needs pruning as a matter of urgency, or the sap will have started to rise and it will bleed when cut. Maybe next year I'll manage to grow vegetables. I didn't even try this year, because there were so many other things to do. Some people are surprised by the low priority I give to growing food, but you can buy perfectly acceptable vegetables in the shops, whereas you cannot buy an ornamental garden. It's a pity that the forecast tomorrow is for more rain.
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