into the rose garden

Having gone to all that trouble to get the mushroom compost with the firm intention of getting on with the border in the front garden where I removed the hebe, I ended up spending today working on a completely different bed in the back garden.  This started because it was suggested that I needed to do something about the roses that were hanging out over the lawn in preparation for the first cut of the season.  It was true, they did need sorting out.  A couple right at the front are supported by iron hoops (very nice but made by a company whose prices subsequently went so high they departed into footballers' and bankers' territory, and I haven't bought any more.  Pity).  Unfortunately I planted the roses first then retro-fitted the hoops to try and stop them flopping over the lawn, and as they are old roses I didn't like to cut them down to stumps to fit the hoops.  The result is that the legs of the hoops are not buried so deep as they should be and so they are not awfully stable, and lean over in the same direction as the roses.  We solved the problem pro-tem with a wooden peg and wire guy ropes.

Lawn cutting apart, it is just the right time to finish tidying up the old roses.  The buds are breaking, the new stems are glowing a reassuring shade of green, and it is very clear which bits of the plant are dead and can be removed.  But then it also turned out to be just the right time to weed and mulch the bed the roses are in.  The back garden slopes downhill from the house, and the people before us, who built the house, had this terraced at some point (not very competently as their builder buried the access to key parts of the septic tank system.  We discovered this when a blockage occured, and the drains engineer, who was a very cheerful Irishman and appeared to truly like drains, told us that there had to be another manhole cover uphill of the one we knew about.  There was.  It took a lot of digging to find it).  The terracing had the effect of exposing the clay subsoil, so the roses live in ugly yellow gunk, slightly improved by adding organic material, that turns to wet slime in winter and sets like concrete in summer.  In between there is a brief period when it is quite pleasant to work, and possible to weed.  That period is now, as there hasn't been any rain for several days and it's been windy which has dried the surface out.  So I have been weeding and mulching like mad, in between snipping dead bits off the roses.  Some of them, including 'Madame Hardy' and 'de Rescht' have the annoying habit that they neither form hips nor drop their old flowers, so require laborious dead-heading.  I suppose it is only once a year, and it is about the only attention they get, but it is a fiddly job.

After weeding I sprinkle around each plant with blood, fish and bone, and 6X.  The latter is a composted chicken manure based fertiliser which has been around for donkey's years.  My late father-in-law swore by it, and called it stinkies, a name that has stuck.  It does smell as though it ought to be doing the plants a world of good.  The mulch is a more recent product, brand name of Strulch.  It is made of chopped straw, treated with minerals so that it takes a good couple of years to rot down fully, and was developed by a scientist at the University of Bradford.  It comes in plastic bags, smells a bit strange when first opened, but shakes down around the emerging foliage of the bulbs and violets quite nicely.  You apply it about 5cm deep, and then water it, at which point it goes dark brown in colour and sticks together pretty well so the wind doesn't dislodge it.  I first read about it in a newspaper article by Bunny Guinness, who was very enthusiastic, and I thought she wasn't going to lend her name to any old tat and it could be worth a try, so I tried it.  I found it very effective in stopping annual weed seeds germinating, and thought it looked OK, so when the first lot ran out I bought some more.  I've seen it being trialled at Ness Botanic Garden, and the bags say 'as used at the Eden project'.  It is available from shops like Crocus, but it is far cheaper per bag to go direct to the manufacturer and buy a pallet.  The bags do leak a bit in the rain, and then the Strulch goes lumpy in the bag, so ideally they would be stored under cover, but I don't have anywhere under cover.  The main disadvantage we've found is that it sticks as if by magic to one of our cats.  Just the one, the grey tabby.  I don't know if that's because of her particular fur, which is very finely crimped and always has a static charge, or if it's just that she likes rolling in the stuff, prior to coming and shedding Strulch around the kitchen.  Anyway, for anybody who would like to give Strulch a go you will find them here.