Repotting, opening envelopes, chopping, sweeping and SPORTS DAY
Hello Friends!
The agapanthus is finally out, the squash are getting ready to gallop and PINCH me but it's almost the holidays...here are my five minute forays for this week:
Monday
I spruce, sweeping away at the tiny apples that my tree has ejected as part of its June drop (because a tree, very sensibly, senses how much fruit it can adequately support, and does an edit in early summer. Clever trees. Someone asked me the other day what I did with all these many sweepings. The answer is that I shove them unceremoniously into the nearest flower-bed. In fact I designed the terrace with this in mind, knowing that I'd never get around to fetching my dustpan and brush and that I'd end up with piles of detritus everywhere. So the terrace falls off directly into a fair few flower-beds, and whatever is in there is, I hope, glad of this nutritious, apple-flecked mulch in the summer months. I also feed all my flowering containers (daisies, sweet peas and tomatoes) with tomato food. I snip off a big bunch of sweet peas and put them in a vase; then I take a deep breath and gather every unopened envelope in the house and do the admin from hell. It needn't be like this. I COULD just open each envelope as and when it dropped on my doormat, but I don't. I let the stuff pile up until I have to hide it in various cupboards, which I cannot open for fear of a revolting, tide of vesuvian admin-bilge falling out. Yes, I am the woman with 58,000 unread emails, and yes, I am the woman with all the unread ACTUAL mail. I used to be ashamed of it, and there was once a time when I challenged myself to open every envelope I received immediately and file/deal with it that very same day. I did it for thirty days but wasn't pleased with myself enough to carry on. Do you know what I mean, friends? There has to be a sort of smugness-pay-off that feels so fantastically brilliant that it makes you want to change your ways. I just felt a surge of relief that I could go back to my old ones. Every eight weeks or so I do this; tackle the mail. It takes an hour or so to open and read, and another (or several days more) to file or deal with. It's not an ideal system but at least I don't have to endure the fear of envelope-opening every day (that was HELL). No, I'd rather do it all in one go. I am left (as usual) with three annoyingly urgent parking fines and tax stuff. The rest can go in the recycling.
Tuesday
Tuesdays are usually for chopping something. At least this is what I hath decreed in my very useful (to me) 5 minute method for keeping my garden under control. It's useful to me because I get easily overwhelmed by enormity (and a garden of any size can feel enormous when there is much to be done). So this method means that I focus myself on one thing only, and Tuesday is chopping. I yank the hedge trimmer out of the shed and charge it up, and while I wait, I write a little post about tomatoes, because I was reminded about them when I fed mine yesterday, and people asked me lots of questions, and I realised there is an awful lot of worry floating around about tomatoes at this time of year. So I wrote a thing about caring for tomatoes in ones sleep. Nobody will read it, but it is there to remind me to unclench, should the tomato-anguish hit me. The mental load is heavy at this time of year, when school is about to break up, and suddenly we are all supposed to turn from NORMAL, RUN-OF-THE-MILL superwomen, to superwomen-packing-cash for all the various teachers. I'm TOTALLY there for giving teachers presents - that's not the issue here. It's more the mania that happens around it on the WhatsApp group...so much so that it needs muting, just so I can sleep at night. Also there is sports day (THREE sports days). I loathe and detest sports day. I am very much hoping that none of my children will care whether I'm there or not... It doesn't matter though, because some good-for-nothing therapist will probably ask them one day whether I ever watched them playing sport, and they will then make my absence MEAN something other than the fact that I loathe sports day. It's okay; they'll survive, and so will I. The battery is charged and I attack the privet. This year I have purposefully NOT clipped my neighbours' side, due to an instinct around how much clipping in the baking heat it will endure. Don't get me wrong, this is a tough shrub, but it gets absolutely ZERO water or food from either of us, and this year I'm cutting into naked wood in order to make an indentation for my gate, which won't open sufficiently at the moment to push a child's bike through. My neighbours are a couple of weeks behind me in clipping their side and I hope they don't get too efficient because I'd like to give the poor thing time to recover after the battering it received today.
I roast a bird and shred it over broccoli and BROAD BEANS in the hope that my children will eat some. I love the way that broad beans send the water in which they are steaming totally crimson. They eat in the garden and each plate comes back covered in surgically removed broad beans which I demolish. We read about the iron age (I have rejected modern encyclopaedias in favour of RJ Unstead, which is probably totally incorrect now but reminds me of my childhood, We learn that iron age people loved to dye their woven linens all sorts of bright colours, and I wonder whether they used broad beans...Well possibly.
Wednesday
A morning that feels like I'm wading through treacle. My brain won't engage. The answer is pretty much always to do something that doesn't require one. Repotting a plant, for example, is an entirely instinctive thing. Roots coming out of pot? Find a bigger one and add a bit more of the same compost...simples. The fiddle leaf fig is today's candidate - summer is a good time to repot indoor plants; they are in active growth and will enjoy the extra space, as well as a shower out of doors. I bought this plant from Ikea about four years ago. I neglected it for a LONG time...even putting it directly beneath a lightbulb so that one of its beautiful leaves got scalded. I don't know why I behave this way sometimes towards plants...it's as if they have, literally, to 'grow' on me (against all odds I might add) before I deign to give them my attention. This one certainly came up trumps, valiantly growing, in spite of my neglect, and patiently sticking with me while I found the perfect spot for it. I repotted it last year and since then it must have grown another 50cm or so. When I remove it from it's cachepot I realise that it has, brilliantly, sent out a couple of very long roots to mine the moisture that was getting caught in the damp space between the plastic and the cache. This root is covered in knobbly hairs and really flexible...completely unlike the rest of the rootball. I untangle it all and remove the plastic. Then I mix a load of peat free multi purpose with a good dose of perlite for drainage and line a new, deeper pot with it, back-filling until the thing is snug in its new home. I give it a warm shower outside, and am totally thrilled by the appearance of two new buds that have appeared at the top as a result of my lopping off the leading shoot and its top leaf a couple of weeks ago. This had felt VERY wrong but it looks like sometimes it's okay to do something that feels wrong. The idea is for this plant to branch out into a tree. I will then remove the bottom leaves gradually and it'll look cute (I hope).
Thursday
There are two sports days today. I manage to go to just one of them and then force myself into the heat for a chopping session. Just five minutes but boy did it make a difference. I deadhead the roses and cut off quite a bit of the russian sage which is threatening to obliterate my newly emerging hydrangeas. I put the hose on the larger hydrangea paniculata standards which always need a little bit of extra help in this kind of heat. I put it on to run at a trickle and leave it there for the rest of the day. I've always been told that if you water long and deep then you'll encourage roots to go downwards towards the water table, making them more able to look after themselves in later seasons...but my hydrangea standards roots have, (I'm assuming) remained resolutely shallow, and I read somewhere recently that in fact the opposite is true; that if you water scantily, then your plant will find the deeper water more readily. I don't know which is right, but I do know that I have to do something about it, and this will probably entail removing some plants and dumping a load of mulch over the top of the existing compost. Bring on autumn.
I write this as I sit outside my small person's room (as usual...for the last year or so I've had to do this in order to prevent her from waking her brother and generally partying all night long). My mantra of "It's not forever" is wearing pretty thin; and tonight she pulls a wall-light off the wall, along with plenty of plasterboard. I shout, but unable to stop for a few, un-take-back-able seconds before I apologise and explain to her that grownups sometimes, OFTEN, mess up and shout because they are TIRED, and it was just a mistake, and we can fix it together in the morning. But please will you just bloody well PLEASE go to sleep.
Friday.
Another sports day and I am made to run a race. Friends... I have never seen my smallest child more delighted. Pure joy because I ran. I fear I may be at all the other sports days forever now, running my heart out in pursuit of a face like that. No gardening.
x Laetitia
PS you may have missed:
Squashing summer boredom: How to sow and grow squash