SHED-heading and other stories, and the Five Minute Garden Approach
Hello Friends!
The weather has been the most beautiful I can remember for a November (I have a short memory, but I'm going with it). Leaf-sweeping and blowing and bagging up has formed the backbone of this week's gardening forays, and it takes me roughly three minutes to sweep the leaves from the terrace each morning and put them in my leaf mould bag. I've very much settled into a routine with the garden, tackling a different thing each day, Monday to Thursday and then using Friday to go a bit deeper. I've written this method (such as it is) up on my website if you're interested.
Monday:
I do a fast eye-sweep of the garden and find a rather large patch of bindweed (my unwanted friend, who loves me so dearly it doesn't want to leave my garden). I yank at it, knowing that this is not the last I'll see of it, and duly forget about it. I keep going with the gravel path, completing its weeding and sweeping, leaving all the forgetmenots and erigeron and pulling out everything else. My five minutes are up.
Tuesday:
I take the secs over to my pear tree whose overhanging branches are slightly too low. Snip snip snip. And then I pull out the step ladder and pull down a dead piece of plum tree which was ripped off during a storm about a year ago and has been wedged atop some lower branches since then. It feels good to get that down. Large branches and rose prunings are taken by my dustmen, who allow me to chuck them into the truck without plastic bags....which is something I s'pose.
Wednesday:
I've been looking forward to this: Wednesdays have become a dedicated planting day here at Five Minute Garden HQ, and I bring my spade, broom and watering can out to the front, digging a lovely deep hole in the newly-created bed next to my front door. I plant the huge Trachelospermum jasminoides into it, sweep the remaining earth away, and water. I can't tie the thing in yet because I'm still waiting for wire to be stretched between the vine eyes, but it's lovely to get this plant out of its pot-prison and into the ground. Done.
Thursday:
I grab a pot saucer, sit down on the terrace and deadhead the cyclamen. It's often a bit difficult to tell which stems are gone over and which are about to come up. Just in case you were wondering, here's a pic with the spent flower (seed head) on the right and the developing flower on the left - it seems obvious when you see it here, but so often I've thought that a seed head was just a bud about to burst, it's useful to have a visual reminder.
Friday:
It's TIDY THE BLOODY SHED DAY!!! Every couple of months my shed just becomes a bomb site. I'm going to blame this entirely on my children who keep shouting at me that they NEED things and preventing me from putting things away properly. I'm going to ignore the fact that it's probably more due to there being a lack of decent storage for things...it's just easier to throw things on the floor than it is to hang something up on a non-existent hook.
So I go in fast, with a rubbish bag and an iron will, and within five minutes the place looks presentable again. I even blow the dust off the floor with my leaf-blower - highly satisfactory.
Hope you have a wonderful week ahead
All the good things, always
xx Laetitia
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