Scarifying, pinching, muck-spreading and not very much else
Hello friends!
This has been a rather slow week. There is of course plenty of work to be done if you can be bothered to do it, but the beauty of Winter in the garden is that frankly, most things can, and will, wait a week or so. My flow was rather meddled with this week, mostly due to all the goings on at all the schools (fairs, concerts, music exams etc) and if I hadn't written it down, I might have felt like I'd done nothing at all, when in fact it wasn't nothing...it was ALMOST nothing....there's a difference you know!
Monday: The ginormous tent which has been monopolising my garden is taken down. It takes an entire day. I do a lot of tea and coffee making, and doling out biscuits until finally they are gone, and my garden is my own again. The flattened lawn looks at me accusingly. I retreat indoors.
Tuesday: Still studiously ignoring the lawn I begin sweeping the massive dump of leaves which have accumulated over the last few days at the bottom of the garden. Leaf-management is one of those things which takes 30 seconds if you do it every day but rather longer if you let it pile up. My lawnmower is broken (again) so I bag the leaves up for municipal recycling, and then I begin to rake some more leaves off the lawn, de-flattening it as I do so. I begin to press a little harder on my rake, and the whole exercise turns into a scarifying fest. Scarifying is very good for your lawn. It's when you drag a spring tine rake over the lawn, quite brutally, removing dead grass and moss and other stuff (thatch), and therefore allowing air, water and nutrients down to the roots. If you have the puff (which I don't) you can make a 90 degree turn and rake the other way too, which will double your gains. The lawn will look like cack afterwards but this should not worry you in the least. Everything'll be rosy come next year.
Wednesday: Sometimes life gets in the way. I could elaborate but this is not that sort of newsletter. By dusk I am pretty much at the end of my rope, but I drag myself outside because I know it will help, and it does. Five minutes plonking horse poo onto my flower beds and spreading it around and I return inside feeling accomplished, as we ALL should.
Thursday: The day is over before it began. I decide to bring in two vases of paperwhite narcissi that have naughtily started to flower (too early for Christmas, but perhaps they knew I would need them before???) The scent lifts me. #recommended
Friday: Again, hardly time to brush my own teeth, but today I go out and pinch out the sweet peas which have grown seriously leggy and, without support, now have 'elbows' ...by which I mean they are growing horizontally and their tips are reaching for the sky in a kind of sad 'L' shape (see below). This won't do, and I snip them down to about an inch or two high, snipping just above where a side-shoot appears. This will hopefully make them shoot more from the base, creating stockier, healthier plants.
And that's it for this week. No extra projects, no pretty floral creations. Nothing instagrammable. This wasn't planned, but I can see that it's probably a rather good thing to have an off-week, especially just before the Christmas madness sets in.
All the good things, as always
x Laetitia