Early April finds me home at Oaklands after 3 months in Dubai - summoned for a meeting at the office in London. I was due to come home for Easter. The early flight home was a blessing and got me into the wood and garden a week earlier than expected. I find Spring in both flower and full voice - the first Chiff Chaffs and Blackcaps are skitting through the wood's canopy in its earliest bud and broadcasting appeals for a mate. The snowdrops have given way to my favourite, the primroses.
An explosion of bluebells and then foxgloves look set to crown May and then June. Everywhere the invasive Laurel has been stripped back with the investment of hard labour the woodland floor is now carpeted with the returned interest of native plants. I have counted hundreds of new foxglove plants. It should be quite a show.
Other small investments are returning their dividends. A couple of year's ago I put in a few Snakesnead Fritillary bulbs. I didn't catch sight of them last year but they seem to have found their stride for 2022.
The compost bays are finally pulling their weight. I literally climbed in and started turning the pile from the left most giant bay onto the middle bay this morning. Back-breaking work and I was quite breathless and wheezy after a nasty late bout of Covid three weeks ago.
Slicing through the geological layers of last Autumn's clearance, cardboard boxes of Xmas pasts and rotten old vegetables finally I struck the Black Gold - prime homemade compost. Friable, odourless dark and full of planty goodness ! That's as scientific as I can get. I know all the theory - I have read dozens of articles.I have tried to keep to the recipe and have spent many an afternoon watering the pile in the most personal way I know. After two long years I have something to show for the trundling backwards and forwards with garden and household waste.
It is like all these firsts. Deeply satisfying when they happen for you. Yes I made a pile of half decent compost from cardboard, garden and kitchen waste and my own urine,
The stuff is beautiful and can recycle back into the Potager to help this year's crops which are beginning to get laid out.
An annual ritual now is to plant some early varieties of interesting potatoes. A variety Jane introduced into the garden last year and "chitted" again this year was Red Duke of York. Two extra large egg boxes of well "chitted" seed potatoes - 23 tubers in all were the first to go in.
I tend to squeeze in more plants than you should but a spacing of about 30 cm. between tubers seemed to work last year. Several wheelbarrow loads of home grown compost were dug back into the bed with 100 litres of a peat free compost as a make-weight. I abandoned no dig and double dug the whole bed. More exercise my back is feeling now as I write this. Bucket cooking really for plants.
Laid out in the trenches.
Labelled with the better hand-writing of the pair of us with a white paint marker on our estate signature slate plant markers and then earthed up into three neat rows. By Late June we should have our first early new potatoes to show for our efforts.
留言