I spent another morning squelching around the back garden, pruning, weeding, and picking fallen leaves out of gravel with my fingertips. The sheer volume of material needing to be removed before spring is quite staggering, and shows what a bit of rain can do. I can't tell you the year's rainfall total to date at this moment, since that's one of the pieces of data waiting to be retrieved from the Systems Administrator's hard disc, but from a recent chat with a friend who gardens locally I think we've already had over 700 mm, compared to average annual rainfall of around 500 mm. And to think that back in the spring we were surrounded by hosepipe bans.
Despite the fact that parts of my back garden have turned into a swamp, and I can feel every footstep sink into the soil, 700 mm of rain is not very much by UK standards. DEFRA and the Met Office are both rather coy about giving me a table of UK averages, at least within the amount of time I have to spare to look for the data, but in a slightly old Guardian article I found a table of UK annual rainfall for the past one hundred years. I shouldn't rely on newspaper articles for that sort of information, otherwise I'll be caught out by statistics like The Daily Telegraph's shock revelation only 100 cod left in the North Sea (correct answer only forty three million cod left in the North Sea), but according to the Guardian there were only four years in the past century when the UK as a whole scored less than 900 mm. OK, the year isn't over yet, but here am I thinking that over 700 mm is more than enough, thank you very much. The UK average is inflated by places like Crib Goch in Snowdonia (thirty year annual average 4,473 mm), but it makes me wonder how people in other parts of the country ever manage to do any gardening at all, or alternatively how I manage to grow anything in a usual semi-arid year. To put 900 mm of rainfall in context, that is what Beirut gets in an average year.
My feet got very cold kneeling or treading carefully in the borders, and after lunch I decided I'd let the chickens out for a run. I saw them the other day trying to peck through the wire at the tussocks of grass outside their chicken run, and thought that they would enjoy the exercise, and some greenery would be good for them. I was planning to combine guarding the chickens with cutting the Eleagnus x ebbingei hedge along the drive, as the Systems Administrator made a beautiful job of the lower half a while back, but hadn't got round to doing the upper part, leaving the hedge looking worrying top heavy and liable to be bashed by every parcel van. I'd reminded the SA about the hedge a couple of times, to be told it was on the SA's list of things to do, and my general maxim is that if you remind someone about something more than twice, it ceases to be reminding and becomes nagging. Sometimes you need to nag people, but not about a hedge.
The hedge always used to be my department anyway, before the SA retired. I got the step ladder out, and began to realise that it had grown a lot since the last time I trimmed it. The SA found me wobbling around on the top of the steps, and asked if I would prefer to use the Henchman. I agreed that would probably be safer. The Henchman is a wonderful thing, consisting of an aluminium platform with a safety rail round three sides of it, supported on four extremely stable flared legs, that bolt in place with cross braces so it can't wobble, collapse or tip in use. The SA bought ours at the Chelsea Flower Show years ago, and it makes working at height a great deal safer. It is light enough for one person to be able to drag it along level ground single handed, though two of you would be needed to manoeuvre it through a border. It has flat, circular feet to spread the weight, which are hinged in all directions, so after moving it you need to check that these are flat on the ground. Apart from that it is a doddle to use.
If I were ever asked to write a book about managing a large garden, for garden owners who have to do everything themselves rather than employing a gardener, one of the things I should stress is the value of investing at the outset in the right equipment. Tractor, trailer, hedge cutting equipment. You can waste a great deal of time and effort, and end up getting yourself into situations which are objectively speaking quite dangerous, trying to care for two acres with kit that would be perfectly adequate for a third of an acre suburban plot. Our next purchase will probably be a post wacker, a heavy, hollow, metal cylinder with handles on each side that you put over the top of a fence or tree post and drop repeatedly, a process much less likely to result in serious injury or death than the alternative method of one person holding the post while the other person hits it with a sledge hammer
Alas, nobody has talent spotted me at a woodland talk and said I should be the new face of television gardening, and we don't go to the sort of dinner parties where one of us might be sitting next to the gardening editor of the Observer, or Frances Lincoln, who upon hearing about our delightful garden and my inimitable prose style would sign me up, so I probably won't be asked to write the book. But you read it here first. Buy the right kit, it's easier in the long run.
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