a whole day in the garden

Finally, a day with no frost to keep me off the ground until half way through the morning, when it didn't start raining at lunchtime, and I didn't have to pack up early to be somewhere else in the afternoon.  I was able to spend a whole day in the garden.  Of course days are not so long at this time of year, but even so I made visible progress down the island bed in the back garden, chopping down aster stems, pulling up weeds and spreading compost.

Areas of this bed had a good dressing of mushroom compost back in the spring.  Much of it is still sitting on the surface in discrete lumps, and I'm afraid it was too fresh when it went on.  I'd have expected the worms and soil organisms to have started incorporating it into the top layer of soil by now.  Still, it was broken down to a tilth (not that I'm planning on sowing seeds in that bed) by the time I'd finished pulling out the running roots of sheeps sorrel and chasing out the grass seedlings and odd pieces of horsetail.  I once read in an article about Gertrude Stein that she asked Alice B. Toklas what she saw when she shut her eyes, and Alice B. Toklas said Weeds, and this was supposed by the author of the article  to be very amusing and witty of Gertrude Stein, who in any case used Alice B. Toklas as a literary device, putting words into her mouth.  However, from my own experience I should say it could have been the literal truth, since there are times when, drifting off to sleep, I just see weeds.  Never mind giving Sisyphus the task of pushing a boulder endlessly up a hill, set him to weed a garden that contains horsetail and sheeps sorrel.

I am lavishing the last bin of home made compost on this bed, since it looks as though it could do with the attention.  There isn't much left, and I must make sure I keep some back to mulch the crowns of the two tender salvias, Salvia involucrata 'Bethellii' and S. guaranitica 'Black and Blue'.  Salvia involucrata 'Bethellii' grows to around a metre tall and has large, bright pink, sage-shaped flowers carried in terminal clusters at the ends of the shoots.  If you were completely into good-taste gardening you might consider it slightly vulgar.  I like it.  I have this plant in the ground, and my original plant in a pot, because I knew it was tender. On balance I should say it prefers being in the ground, when it survives at all. The top growth of my outside plant was killed completely during last winter, and it was so slow to reshoot that I thought it must be dead, though it put on quite a lot of growth eventually.  Not so many flowers as the one in the RHS picture, though.  Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue' is another large, tender sage, each dark blue flower held dramatically in a black calyx.  The RHS can't rate it so highly as 'Bethellii', since it doesn't have the Award of Garden Merit, and 'Bethellii' does, but I consider it equally attractive, and it seems comparably willing to grow, or not.

The cut-down herbaceous stems are piling up nicely in the compost bins, which should now be restored to a proper sequence, new material going in at the left hand end, and the contents of each bin being turned into the next at intervals, until by the time they reach the last bin on the right they have been transformed as if by magic into soil improver.  Compost is wonderful stuff.  When I mulch with compost I feel as though I am adding life to the soil, as well as merely improving its texture and ability to retain moisture.  It is frustrating how such a big heap of prunings reduces down to such a small amount of compost at the end of it.

At three I decamped to the front garden, so that I could guard the chickens while they had a run.  They haven't been out for a few days, since we've been out or it has rained in the afternoon.  Actually, I don't think it did rain yesterday, but it must have been too cold for the Systems Administrator to be able to face hanging around the garden for an hour watching poultry.  The chickens were eager to eat grass, and pleased to be let out.  They behaved themselves very nicely, remaining near me in the front garden while I cleaned their roosting board and spread fresh sawdust on it, then weeded the gravel and picked dead Eleagnus x ebbingei leaves out of it.  Indeed, they liked it so much that the last two hens refused to go back into their hen house until gone half past four, by which point I was getting rather chilly, and couldn't see to weed.  Tomorrow I'm going out, so it will be up to the SA's kindness and discretion whether they get to free range for an hour or two.