I have been trimming the side of the Eleagnus hedge facing the drive. I had to reduce it severely a couple of years ago, otherwise we would never have had another oil delivery, and by the time I'd finished it was almost bald. I was nervous about its prospects of recovery, but implacable in my desire for a continued supply of hot water, so the oil delivery won. The hedge grew back lustily, and after being tipped back several times is getting quite dense on that side, so today's trim was a case of shortening the long new growths to keep it bushy and off the drive. I will need to get the Henchman platform out to reach the top, and thought I'd leave that until after Saturday's post, so in the meantime it is ridiculously top heavy where recent gales have blown the new, high whippy growth out sideways.
Then I shall have to steel my nerves to give the back a hard chop. The hedge has got inexorably fatter and saggier over time, and is now taking up a good yard of the patio and daffodil lawn. It is too tall as well, and shades the summer pots on the patio for too much of the day. It is good practice if you have to take a hedge back hard to do one side at a time, and let the first recover before tackling the second. Let us hope the Eleagnus can repeat its Lazarus trick for a second time. If I had known twenty years ago what I know now I'd have planted hornbeam or yew. Alas, I did not.
The compost heaps are already rather full, which is not ideal when there is so much to come off the garden in the next few months. Hedge trimmings, the tomato plants, the dahlia tops, and then all the herbaceous material in the borders, plus the spent compost from the summer pots. I eyed up the bins hopefully to see if there was any compost ready use on the borders. If it is only going on as a mulch rather than being dug in then I reckon that it doesn't need to be one hundred per cent fine and crumbly, and some remaining stems and twiggy bits will be fine and give the worms something to do. I decided the contents of the two oldest bins were worth bagging up to put on the long bed, if I picked the largest uncomposted pieces of stem and Santolina branches out. The middle bin was not quite ready, but getting there, so it could have the contents of the tomato grow bags when I get round to emptying them, and the potting compost from the Tithonia and Cosmos pots.
That left three bays of garden waste mixed with litter from the hen house and kitchen vegetable waste that were nowhere near composted, so for now all fresh clippings and prunings can go on them. I put the bits of Eleagnus on, except for the thickest stems. Evergreen leaves are slow to rot, but they get there eventually. The Eleagnus stems were individually too small and fiddly to fork on to the bonfire anyway, and I have quite enough bags of non-compostable waste waiting to go to the dump already. There was another bag of long grass once the Systems Administrator had cut the sloping edge of the daffodil lawn, using an electric hedge trimmer, as it happens. (I bought the electric trimmer for just that purpose, because it took such a dispiritingly long time to do it with shears, not to mention the time I strained my wrist cutting it in the second week of December and it wasn't right again until well into the New Year. The electric hedge trimmer is not allowed anywhere near a hedge. I do the Eleagnus with secateurs, to make sure each cut is made just above a leaf).
Raking out dead leaves and pulling up weeds from under the hedge filled another bag, and I'm not even half way along yet. I began to feel rather dismayed about the bags. Today's tally brings me back up to thirteen. How many car loads to the dump can I manage before Love and Dear give way to questions about whether I am sure that I don't have a gardening round?
No comments:
Post a Comment