Wednesday 19 November 2014

on sand

It was raining heavily when I woke up.  I could tell from the sound of rain drumming on the roof and splashing on the path under the window, before I got up and looked out.  The puddle in the drive stretched across most of the full width of the gravel, which it only does when we've had quite a lot of rain.  But by the time I'd dished out the cats' breakfast, fed the chickens, sorted out the laundry, found a small and soggy rosebud to go in a tiny vase on the kitchen table, washed a few odd mugs left over from last night, refilled the water tank in the Systems Administrator's coffee machine and taken the SA a cup of tea, it had stopped raining.

The back garden was sodden, as I found while looking for a flower to pick, but the front garden takes only minutes to drain enough to be workable.  That is one of the redeeming features of gardening on sand.  Nutrients run out of it like soup through a colander, droughts turn into an endurance test of nerves and how long you are prepared to stand with a hose, and your planting palette is largely dictated by what will survive, but you can go and play in your garden ten minutes after it's finished raining.  On foot, that is.  I've noticed water lying in the tyre tracks between the beds on the lettuce fields in recent days, where the tractors driving up and down the same route every time have compacted the soil, and there were huge puddles of standing water at the end of one of the fields, presumably where the tractors turn after each pass.  Even sand will compress to an airless, impermeable mass if subjected to too much traffic.  But one solitary gardener walking or crawling around is not going to do any harm.

The SA remarked after I spent yesterday afternoon weeding the gravel that it looked cold out there. It doesn't feel particularly cold yet, well wrapped up.  There was next to no wind, and shovelling the odd barrow load of gravel as a change from weeding kept the circulation going.  Two large bulk bags of gravel are not going to be enough to do the whole of the planted gravel areas properly, on the other hand they are probably as much as I want to commit to moving in one go.  It's quite therapeutic, raking a small hand fork through the gravel to loosen the weed grass, swirling it up in handfuls with my fingertips, trimming dead flower heads off the thyme plants I didn't get round to earlier in the year, and having the occasional good dig after deeper rooted weeds.

The dwarf willow tree I planted back in the summer looks healthy, its tiny twigs plump and shiny, but it is still only three inches tall, and I am worried that the SA will tread on it without noticing. Maybe I had better put a stake next to it.  I have the same issue in the borders with plants that disappear completely from view in the winter, which I'm apt to disturb trying to plant something else in what I think is a space.  I could do with a miniature set of the rusted iron ball-topped plant stakes I use to tie up larger things.  At the moment I use bamboo canes, but they aren't very good, tending to rot off at the base or get kicked over.

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