It's not especially cold this year, but I'm feeling the cold. An hour outside is about as much as I can handle at the moment, before the tips of my fingers start reddening, my face starts falling off and my womb starts sacrificing my extremities as surplus to requirements. An hour is time for a fair amount, though. January hours:
In an hour before twilight up at the allotment I flattened one of the alarming heaps up on the allotment. I've been referring to them as "potential burial sites" but having cleared one, the only thing buried in them is massive roots of horseradish and black bin bags (yes, really) full of couch grass roots. I'm sure my allotment predecessor absolutely meant to take them to the tip, but as I discovered when I tried that myself, a bag of couch grass is punishingly heavy. One of these heaps is now flattened into this year's potato bed (look mum I'm rotating my crops!) and the black bin bags have gone into the waste, and the couch grass into the couch grass disposal tube.
Other hours up at the allotment have been less impressive (weeding the broad beans and onions, arranging last year's brown, sere weeds into wind breaks, clearing couch grass from another bed, a bit of fitful digging) but I'm getting up there most weeks, so all good.
It's not always a sustained hour, of course. I've more had an hour in ten minute snatches about my garden this weekend, but in that time I got all the remaining bulbs into the soil (while admiring all the shoots from the ones that went in 1-3-5-7 weeks ago), gave the shed a rough tidy, swept up some leaves, got hold of a teeny-tiny pine tree for the culinary shelf (the shop I bought it from promptly brought out all the rest of their leftover tiny growing Christmas trees, did I encourage them?) and sat down with a cup of tea on the bench while mentally compiling 2020 job lists, that most important of gardening jobs.
I also spent an hour reading a gardening picture book, The Wildlife Friendly Vegetable Gardener, by Tammi Harting with pretty illustrations by Holly Ward Bimba, which was fun, albeit North American (to be honst, the presence of a sugar glider and a humming bird on the cover should have tipped me off). Tips like "crab apple trees in hedgerows keep black bears out of orchards" probably aren't going to be terribly useful until we've gone a lot further down the rewilding route, but added a pleasurable fantasy twist to the reading. I borrowed the book to inform me up at the allotment, where I'm finding the presence of resident wildlife inhibitory on getting the area clear and productive. I end up thinking "oh, no, ants!" way too much. She had a lot of suggestions to help with the this:
Allotment 2020
In an hour before twilight up at the allotment I flattened one of the alarming heaps up on the allotment. I've been referring to them as "potential burial sites" but having cleared one, the only thing buried in them is massive roots of horseradish and black bin bags (yes, really) full of couch grass roots. I'm sure my allotment predecessor absolutely meant to take them to the tip, but as I discovered when I tried that myself, a bag of couch grass is punishingly heavy. One of these heaps is now flattened into this year's potato bed (look mum I'm rotating my crops!) and the black bin bags have gone into the waste, and the couch grass into the couch grass disposal tube.
Other hours up at the allotment have been less impressive (weeding the broad beans and onions, arranging last year's brown, sere weeds into wind breaks, clearing couch grass from another bed, a bit of fitful digging) but I'm getting up there most weeks, so all good.
It's not always a sustained hour, of course. I've more had an hour in ten minute snatches about my garden this weekend, but in that time I got all the remaining bulbs into the soil (while admiring all the shoots from the ones that went in 1-3-5-7 weeks ago), gave the shed a rough tidy, swept up some leaves, got hold of a teeny-tiny pine tree for the culinary shelf (the shop I bought it from promptly brought out all the rest of their leftover tiny growing Christmas trees, did I encourage them?) and sat down with a cup of tea on the bench while mentally compiling 2020 job lists, that most important of gardening jobs.
I also spent an hour reading a gardening picture book, The Wildlife Friendly Vegetable Gardener, by Tammi Harting with pretty illustrations by Holly Ward Bimba, which was fun, albeit North American (to be honst, the presence of a sugar glider and a humming bird on the cover should have tipped me off). Tips like "crab apple trees in hedgerows keep black bears out of orchards" probably aren't going to be terribly useful until we've gone a lot further down the rewilding route, but added a pleasurable fantasy twist to the reading. I borrowed the book to inform me up at the allotment, where I'm finding the presence of resident wildlife inhibitory on getting the area clear and productive. I end up thinking "oh, no, ants!" way too much. She had a lot of suggestions to help with the this:
Allotment 2020
- A place to sit and watch the wildlife
- A magnifying glass, so I can say "ooh ants!" instead of "oh no! ants! sorry ants!")
- An observation journal that is fine for allotment visitors to read and which gives me somewhere to record the wildlife
- A wildlife trap camera (ooh, they've come down in price) so I can get to know my fox in invasive detail
- A bit of the allotment where I'm doing no-dig - clearing an area with a thick newspaper layer/ thin layer of soil/thick layer of mulch
- A flow pattern of perennial vegetables/tussocky things from the top to the bottom of the allotment to create a bird/insect corridor
- Some pots with why-the-heck-are-you-doing-that seeds growing in them (Tammi suggests apples)
- A combined strawberry and asparagus raised bed
- A comfrey, nettle and fennel patch for pollinators and green compost
- Cosmos around the compost bin
- A shallow water supply/permanent puddle (upturned bin lid? Something recycled.)
- A predictable wildlife feeding spot in a sheltered bit of the allotment, where I can put spare produce, seedheads, spoiled veg, etc. to be cleared by badgers, birds and foxes
- Shelter stacks of brown waste/woody weeds for amphibians and bugs
- Sunflowers among my raspberries as bird distractions
My final January hour was spent in a very #loveyourthicket frame of mind, pulling back the boundaries of a friend's native hedge, uprooting and chopping off its suckers and using the trimmings to thicken the boundary line. It's a single-line hedge, which is polite in a backgarden context, but which does tend towards thinning and bolting. I got a reasonable amount of hedge trimmed, all threaded back into the boundary line (leaving a squeeze-through gap so next door's kids can retrieve their footballs) though it's still pretty wild. The sap was rising and the buds were bursting - it's not very cold this winter! I had a good time, rumbling along the hedge, mumbling to myself, browse down the suckers, nibble back the boundaries, trim back the shoots, channelling the large herbivores that might have sustained a scrub clearing garden like this one in days of yore. She gets occasional muntjac and a bumbling badger in the back garden, but neither of them are going to nibble back the upper branches, so it's up to us to be the temperate megafauna in the garden.
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