utility gardening

Nettles are definitely more vitriolic at this time of the year.  I have been weeding around the compost bins, and the Systems Administrator tackling the undergrowth along the side of the wood, and we have both been stung through our clothes.  My hands are now tingling where my plasticised green gardening gloves, normally proof against anything short of thorns, were no match for the nettles, and the SA has caught it on the legs and the stomach.  Old bees have a similar trick, their venom becoming more concentrated as they age.

It would be nice to get to the end of weeding the utility area.  Goodness knows, we have enough bags of shredded twigs from the great hedge reduction project, waiting to be used as mulch.  I tackled a lot over the winter, and mulched the parts I'd weeded, but fresh weeds managed to germinate here and there and then formed spreading mats over the mulch.  It was a relief on pulling them up to see most of the original layer of twigs still intact beneath.  But there are stretches where I didn't weed before, behind the row of bins and towards the hedge, and there the nettles have grown tall and venomous, while over towards the Systems Administrator's old greenhouse there is a great patch of wild mallow, which is all very nice while it's out but seeds itself everywhere and gets mixed up with the piles of stuff waiting to go on the bonfire.  I shouldn't have left the job half done last time, only weeding around the bonfire heap and the compost bins is not nearly half so much fun as working in the borders, or as urgent in spring as pricking out young seedlings, and so what with one thing and another it slipped down the list of things to do.

There is a fine patch of free range raspberry canes in front of one of the compost bins, where roots from the original canes in the fruit cage have run.  They are rather in the way of the bin where they are, and besides the blackbirds would have most of the fruit, but they are so much bigger and better than their parent canes, it tells you what they think about life on the site of a former compost heap compared to life in their allotted quarters next to a hedge.  Mending the fruit cage is another of those jobs that just didn't manage to get done last winter, but maybe this autumn.  In the meantime I am saving the splendid canes until I can move them, and I can see that if and when I do I had better give them a very generous dose of compost and manure.

There are some Jerusalem artichokes as well, originally planted to screen the view of the Systems Administrator's greenhouse when it was new.  That plan didn't turn out well.  Half of the artichokes got buried by piles of bonfire-bound rose prunings, which in turn got covered by long grass raked from the daffodil lawn after mowing, an error which it took me hours to disentangle and which will not be repeated.  The other half turned out to be too close to the site of the bonfire and got scorched.  I planned to dig the tubers up last winter and replant them in the vegetable garden, but only got as far as the first half of the plan before being wiped out by flu over Christmas.  They stayed in a bucket in the garage for some weeks, while I fretted periodically that I needed to clear a bed for them and replant them, but before I managed to do anything about it they had dried up and decayed.  I thought I would just have to buy a fresh packet of tubers as and when I had a bed ready to plant them in, when a fresh crop of stalks next to the bonfire heap announced that I had not dug nearly all the tubers out.  This puts me pretty much where I was this time last year, except that this time I will prepare the planting site for them before digging them up, if I have time.  In the meantime the foliage of several is withered and blackened since the SA had a couple of bonfires recently.

The hornbeam hedge is looking better than it has for years.  I fed it last winter with fish, blood and bone, and it has shown its appreciation by making some bushy growth and not just sending out long, pathetic twigs as it desperately tries to turn into a tree.  The polytunnel, on the other hand, needs reskinning before it would be good for anything except any vermin living in the mass of brambles inside it.  And there are self sown ash trees growing behind the compost bins.  I was thinking I'd have to dig their roots out and quailing at the thought, but I might just cut them down flush with the ground and cover the stumps with Mypex.  One is showing signs of ash dieback anyway.

I like the idea of growing fresh fruit and vegetables, I really do.  It's just the practical reality of the nettles and the brambles and the ash seedlings and the collapsing fruit cage and knackered polytunnel, all requiring more time and effort to sort them out than I ever manage to muster.