Seed sowing, hydrangea chopping, lawn mowing and music exams!
You know that feeling when you get to the end of a week and last Monday feels like a year ago? Well that. We (my daughter and I) had a music exam on Tuesday and I feel utterly squelched by it. Why do I care about my kids and their music? I care about it because I want them to experience the joy of playing for pleasure, and you can't do that unless you have mastered the bastardly instrument to a certain extent. I've not read the things everyone else has about how you've got to practice something for 1000 hours in order to master it. I don't need to, because I just believe it. Learning how to do something hard is, well, HARD. It requires one of three things:
1. A natural ability (i.e. genius, like Mozart...we don't have that)
2. A natural, almost obsessive curiosity (yeah, we don't have that either)
3. Discipline. (now THAT, we can wangle)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not that woman who makes her kids practice for hours a day, banning playdates and everything else that gets in the way. We only actually practice for 5-10 minutes...yes - it's a REALLY short amount of time each day, but it IS each day, and my nine year old does NOT want to do it. It takes a gargantuan effort of cajoling, insisting and STAYING CALM to get the thing done each day. It takes a fair few tantrums and quite a bit of reminding and comforting and vocalising the WHY of practice, and saying, in all manner of ways "well of course, you can just stop right now if you like!" to get that practice under our belts every day. I doubt myself EVERY single time we do it, wondering whether our energies would be better spent elsewhere, or frankly, just sitting together, hands entwined, chatting about movies and cupcakes...so it's not just her that I'm convincing, it's MYSELF too. So yes, by the time we get to an exam (and friends, we are only on grade three here) I am just as invested as she is in everything going well, and I want to rip the bloody violin off her and go and do it myself (because when you're older than nine you've learnt that performance, and artistic impression and a smile and a twinkly eye will mean the difference between merit and distinction (or in our case a fail and a pass). Bloody hell, it's exhausting but I'm just going to keep on going, because MUSIC and JOY awaits if we can only get through the hellish bit....yes????
Oh God. Are you still reading? Here is some gardening then.
Monday
Last week I set out my salad plan (I love that I have a salad plan). It's a simple one, which is conceived to begin once the weather is warm enough to do everything outside. But as usual, I'm impatient and decide to start a few 'practice' hearted lettuce indoors. My lettuce go in a small old plastic pot filled with multi-purpose compost. Three tiny seeds. Once they come up I will take them out of the lidded tray and grow them on until they are ready to be planted into their own individual pots (probably small, plastic ones again). I will harden off these, using a cold frame and then eventually put them in small individual terracotta pots, and I will nurture them until they are fully hearted up, and I can chop them down in their entirety, creating one big family salad. That's the plan anyway. I'll let you know how I get on. Too late, I remember the JOY of the jiffy 7 (whose virtues I have extolled altogether too much in previous missives) Honestly though, these are my favourite things on the planet right now, allowing me to sow on a total whim, without the need even to leave my kitchen..I KNOW right! I sow three little tiny parsley seeds into three of these pellets, and put them in the propagator. I usually sow parsley in Feb but I forgot, so I am playing catchup here.
Tuesday
Violin exam. No gardening.
Wednesday
I rush out to play catchup because I had PLANS for the Tuesday chop...namely my hydrangeas (some paniculata, some Annabelle) need pruning to get them ready for new growth and beauteousness this year. The Annabelle (I have three) need pruning to a suitable 'framework' which is basically a maddeningly opaque way of saying 'use your instinct' or 'go with your gut'. You need to pick a point you're comfortable with and cut just above two fat buds. For Annabelle that might be quite low down, because the lady tends to flop. Here (from a letter I sent last year) are the rules for all the different hydrangeas though:
Most hydrangeas will be perfectly happy without any pruning at all, but If you think that your plant is under-performing, or out of shape, then pruning it could be just the ticket to billowing clouds of blooms this summer. Mop-heads and lace-caps (macrophylla) have thick, toothed, heart-shaped leaves. Blooms are usually blue, pink or purple. Lace-caps have tiny fertile flowers surrounded by larger infertile ones, and mop-heads, as the name suggests, have large blooms all over. Quercifolia (oakleaf) are easy to identify from their wavy-edged leaves. If yours is performing well, then get out there and remove the faded flowers and any dead or diseased stems. If the plant is a bit lacklustre, then removing one third of the living stems from the base should pep it up. Arborescens (the most common of these is the cultivar ‘Annabelle’) has much thinner, floppier, smoother leaves and big lollypop-like blooms which start off green, become white and then turn green again. Paniculatas have smaller leaves that grow three to a stem, in a whorl. Blooms come in a variety of different shapes but always start off white and fade to dusty pink with time. Both of these bloom on new wood so if the shape bothers you, then now is the time to correct things, removing any wayward stems, or pruning to a framework, just above a pair of buds, before the plant starts galloping away with the warmer weather. Climbing hydrangeas can be left well alone until after flowering.
Thursday
If you read my frankly rambling and incomprehensible message last week you'll know that the wind had knocked over my myrtle trees in pots and I had left them on their sides while the weather subsided, in order to minimise damage. I had begun to dig a hole for one of them, but never finished the job (and this is far more typical of most people's experience of gardening projects than they like to admit) I do find though that failure, procrastination and the general NON MEETING of expectations creates a rather happy type of learning curve. Not to get all self-aware on you, but here's a thing: the more I am presented by the fact that not meeting my goals does not the end of the world make, the more I actually achieve, because well, it's the JOURNEY and all that isn't it. So the hole is still un-dug, and the trees are still on the ground. I put the pots upright, undecided what to do and I water them because they are dry. I spin the pots around and see for the first time in a long time how out of shape these trees are, and all of a sudden I know what to do (at least in the short term.) Here's the plan; I will wait until the beginning of May, at which point I will prune pretty drastically, and then feed, and then I will decide where these things will go. That might mean repotting them into larger containers with new compost, or it might mean going back to that pesky hole and finishing the digging job. Whatevs.
Friday
I go out, yank out the broom and sweep, pull out the widger and kneeler and weed (so much weeding to be done) and do a general spruce up. This is my usual Monday activity but it's also great for a busy Friday when brain power is in scant supply, and autopilot seems like the best idea. Five minutes pass, and then another five, and another. I pull out the battery for my mower and click it in, earphones on, podcast on. Mowing a lawn is boring, but when you don't have to worry about mowing over cables then it becomes pretty therapeutic. I was given a cordless mower by the kind people at Stihl, and I love it madly. Obviously I haven't tried any of the other cordless mowers out there, so I can't compare its performance with anything except the last mower I had (a Bosch mower with a cable that I had mowed over multiple times and finally died on me at the end of last summer) but I've used it three times since I got it and it's increased my enjoyment of this boring job tenfold. Big thumbs up and I'll be posting a detailed review (not sponsored) very soon.
And that's it! Wishing you everything lovely for the coming week, and much blossom and tulipery xxx
All the good things
x Laetitia
PS you might have missed:
My favourite pots for seed sowing
Best seed sowing compost