I spent today tidying the utility area. Unless you are prepared to put everything out for council green waste collection or take it to the tip, you need somewhere for compost bins and bonfires, plus in our case the remains of the fruit cage, the Systems Administrator's forsaken greenhouse, a polytunnel badly in need of reskinning and arguably too close to the hedge, and the vegetable patch, currently in the course of renovation.
It is not a glamorous gardening job, but needs doing. Part of the immediate impetus came from the fact that the SA has been diligently shredding the piles and piles of branches I cut out of the hedge, and the bags of shreddings are accumulating all over the place. It is not awfully morale boosting to spend your time pushing hawthorn twigs through a shredder to make mulch that your co-gardener never uses, so I thought I'd better weed some more of the untidy spaces between the bins, the bonfire heap, cage and greenhouse, and spread the chippings on them to make neat, weed-free paths. Unfortunately the chippings I spread before have not been up to the job of suppressing an emerging crop of goose grass and speedwell, so it took some time scrabbling and scraping to nip these out. I am hopeful that if I don't let any grow and seed this year (a big if, admittedly), the reservoir of seed near the surface will be exhausted, and the problem will sort itself out.
I am also aware that the time when I should be making my first sowings of vegetables and cut flowers is growing nearer, assuming I am going to grow any this year, and since I've already bought some seeds I really should give it a go. I could already have sown broad beans, if I'd got around to it, but the books always say comfortingly that later sowings catch up with earlier ones. Maybe next week. I'd already done quite a lot of work weeding most of the beds, but they need a final going over, and there are a few intimidating and intractable looking patches of grass and other perennial rooting nasties left to tackle. Fork out what I can, and hit the regrowth with glyphosate, I reckon.
The other thing I need to do with the vegetable beds is finish moving the last of what was a truly gigantic compost heap on to them. Nowadays we have a series of bins, and it is quite organised, but in the early days I just piled everything in a great mound, which grew until it looked more like a neolithic burial site than a compost heap. Early experiments with vegetables demonstrated that without improvement the soil in the top part of the garden was incapable of producing decent crops. Or at least, incapable without the levels of irrigation the lettuce farm uses. So I began to move the great heap on to the veg patch, killing two birds with the proverbial stone, and I'd like to finish moving it because then I could spread wood chippings over the place where it was, and it would all be tidy. Except that there is quite a lot of it left. It is a peculiar spreading shape, like a limestone escarpment, with a shallow slope at the back and a steep face at the front where I've been digging it out, and I don't know how to estimate its volume with any pretence of accuracy at all, but there's a lot of it. Quite a few cubic metres, possibly four or five, when I try to compare it in my mind's eye with a dumpy bag of gravel from a builders yard. It isn't heavy, but that's still a lot of trips with the wheelbarrow.
Before I could do any of this I had to move the large heaps of hedge prunings that were still piled on the vegetable beds. The only place to put them was on the site of the bonfire, so we can't have a bonfire until they've been shredded. So many things you can only do after you've done something else.
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