Yesterday's fierce wind had dropped this morning to a more manageable though still chilly breeze, and the sun was shining, so I wrapped myself up and cautiously took my sinuses outside to do some shredding. There were piles of branches I sawed out of the hedge stacked up along the entrance, while in the meadow there are more heaps of ash twigs from the huge branch that came down across the pond, and I haven't even started cutting the boundary hedge along the meadow yet. In an ideal world I'd have pretty much finished the hedges by now, and be thinking about moving on to the roses and buddleia, but I have noticed that the world is frequently not ideal in January.
Woody prunings are the opposite of holes in the ground. When you dig a hole, you end up with a mound of earth out of all proportion to the size of the hole. It is unfathomable where all that spare soil could possibly have come from. When you shred prunings, you can spend all morning at it and by the end the number of bags of useful chippings and bigger branches for firewood seems disappointingly small. At the end of my labours two huge heaps had yielded four and a half bags of mulch and one wheelbarrow of branches that were fat enough to be worth cutting up for firewood.
I have got more grasping about firewood over the years. When we first moved here it was not so very long after the 1987 storm, and the wood hadn't been touched since then. The supply of fallen trees kept us going for years, while everything in the garden was so small and immature that any prunings went straight on the bonfire heap. Nowadays anything woody that's too big to go through the shredder is a candidate for fuel. Hawthorn, hazel, eucalyptus, yew, Crataegus 'Paul's Scarlet', mature ivy, holly, willow, waterlogged winter cherry, juniper, if it grew and was made of wood we'll put it in the log burner.
I'd finished in the front garden by lunchtime, and moved down to the wood in the afternoon. The arborists made an extremely neat job of bringing down the partially fallen birch and sectioning it (which reminds me I must post their cheque and not just drive past the postbox with it in my handbag). The brushwood was stacked neatly in one pile and the logs from the main trunks and branches in two more. All this was achieved with remarkably little trampling, and the emerging snowdrops are pristine. But there must be more bulbs under the piles of debris, and besides I want them out of the way so that I can assess the area available for planting.
As I started sorting the brushwood between pieces small enough to shred and those large enough to burn it began to rain, only a light shower but enough to make me think I'd better cover the shredder and put the electric cable away. I went on lopping and sorting, and carting pieces of firewood out of the wood until about quarter to four, when it began to get rather dark. I thought I'd maybe done enough for one day, and went inside for some tea. As I sat at the kitchen table there was a strange hissing noise, and I wondered initially what the cat was doing and then whether there was something horribly wrong with the hot water system before realising that it was a hailstorm. After the hail came wet snow. I hope it melts before it freezes, otherwise I can't see myself getting much done outside tomorrow. January can be an awfully frustrating month, what with the weather and the germs.
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