After saying that I must concentrate on spreading Strulch, today I did not touch so much as a single bucket of it. First of all I watered the ditch bed, and then I helped the Systems Administrator move the piles of cut brambles down from the meadow to the bonfire heap, now that we have a working lawn tractor, and then I inspected the bees, and then I finished watering the ditch bed and watered all the pots. And by the time I'd had a tiny fit of domesticity and emptied the dishwasher it was gone seven and time to sit down.
The ditch bed and the retro kidney shaped bed round the three river birches are looking very pretty. A fresh crop of weeds is coming through, when you look closely, and some of the flower stems have been eaten off by rabbits or muntjac, but there are primroses, violets, pulmonaria and anemonella, and great clumps of Erythronium 'Pagoda', which seems the easiest of the trout lilies. The primroses are mostly the wild yellow sort, but there are some pink ones, a few of the little purple 'Wanda', some odd dark red, and a soft pink and white double which are both lasting remarkably well. Double primroses are not always long lived plants, and I tend not to get round to splitting them and replanting in fresh enriched soil as I would if I were more of a primrose specialist. There are little violets in a good shade of pinky mauve, and bigger ones in blue. The pink violets and the primroses have seeded themselves into the shaded part of the lawn where it is turning to moss. The hellebore flowers are ageing gracefully, as hellebores do, and the spotted leaves of Arum italicum 'Pictum' are making fine fat clumps, since for once nothing has dug up and eaten the tubers. So the ditch and birch beds are looking very nice, and I enjoyed standing looking as I gently played the hose over them.
There were a lot of brambles. If I'd been properly on top of them over the past couple of years there wouldn't have been so many, so if I can have a go at the roots with the pickaxe over the remainder of the year then it shouldn't be so bad next year. Rubus cockburnianus simply needs to go. It is much, much too rampant. I can imagine situations in which it could be useful, if you had a spare acre to cover, or if it were safely confined on an island, or maybe in the middle of an area of grass that was mowed weekly so that its questing adventitious shoots were regularly cut down, but it is a menace in a normal garden setting, even in a large garden. We did not manage to get all the brambles and hedge prunings back in today's session, because after a couple of hours the old lawn tractor began to get rather hot and bothered. It was quite enough anyway, since by then the Systems Administrator's back had gone.
Four of the bee colonies were bursting out of their boxes and were beginning to think about swarming. I should really have looked at them last week, only I was committed to going to London on the one really hot day, and the following day when it was warmish my chest was so bunged up I couldn't cope with the idea of opening the bees, and then the chilly easterly started blowing again. Admittedly I could have put supers on, but I expect they'd have started to think about swarming anyway. They are good natured bees, every hive, but swarmy. The fifth colony was not doing so well, for reasons that remain mysterious, but the small colony in the nuc, that never built up or did anything useful all last summer, was crammed with bees and had brood on every one of its five frames but without any signs of wanting to swarm. The sixth colony was almost beeless. It was originally the other half of the mysteriously weak fifth colony, created by splitting a strong colony last spring, and I had never been able to find any obvious symptoms of disease or reason for its lacklustre performance since.
I gave the full size box from the failed colony to the nuc. This was at one level a risky strategy, given that I didn't know why the failed colony didn't thrive, and it might have been something infectious. But the nuc was failing for most of last year, before rallying to the point where it needed a bigger box, and I don't have an endless supply of beehives to give every colony a brand new, guaranteed infection free one every time. Putting a slightly suspect small colony into a slightly suspect box and reserving my new boxes for swarm control in the booming colonies seemed the best solution.
Besides which, I haven't made up the new boxes yet, I've been so busy with other things. And now it's urgent. It remains to be seen how much of the Strulch will ever find it's way on to the borders before winter.
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