Lightly does it

The first sunny day inspires many gardeners to rush outside and spend several hours weeding, pruning and digging. However, after a winter of perusing the seed catalogues, this is asking for trouble.  More gardening injuries occur in spring than at any other time.  Backs, knees, hips – gardeners can suddenly discover parts of our bodies they lost touch with months ago.  A friend emailed me to say she had weeded her plot for 3 hours and was aching really badly.....

The initial green work out should start with some gentle stretching before heading off to the potting shed to warm up muscles and joints and reduce the risk of strain. If you delve into the borders, a kneeling mat is an essential piece of kit but remember to plant your knees firmly in the middle of it rather than bending and stretching further than you are used to.  As for digging, Doc and I try to avoid it.  There is much to be said for no-dig methods of cultivation and there is no satisfaction to be had from a neatly double-dug garden if you spend the rest of the week in bed!

Lifting is always risky, whether it is a small plant or a heavy bag of rubbish and given how many gardeners are pulling on their wellies and lugging bags of compost around at this time of year, it’s a wonder the A & E departments are not full.  We should remember to bend our knees and keep the back straight, both when picking up and putting down.  How many of us face the direction in which the load is to be carried to order to avoid twisting our spines? 

We don’t have a hover mower but a neighbour tells me they are notorious for causing back problems. This is because the user tends to swing it from side to side instead of pushing it in front, facing the direction they are cutting the grass. 

Since I now have limited capabilities in the garden I don’t have to worry too much about over-doing it on the plot because I know my limitations.  However, I have always been a firm believer in changing tasks regularly.  This means I do tasks that use different parts of my body rather than doing lots of repetitive movement.  But the best thing is not to try and do everything at once. An hour a day is enough initially and you can always work up to more as the days get longer.

Currently my average time spent in the garden at any one time is around half an hour and it is surprising how much can be done in such a short time.  I focus on two or three small tasks which I plan in advance and regrettably I have to accept I cannot do the more energetic jobs. 

Today I cut back some sedum 'Autumn Joy'. The flowers bring a rich, deep pink to the flower border in the autumn and then the flower heads go to seed, turn brown and provide texture and form throughout the winter months.  They also protect the fresh, young green shoots from frost.  Eventually though, the attractive bronze turns to grey and withered so I have cut the back the clump to just above the new growth. 

Whilst I was snipping off the spent stems of the sedum I sniffed with the sweet, heady scent of the creamy-white flowers of our Sarcococca (sweet box). It is a compact, evergreen shrub which flowers in winter, followed by followed by red, purple or black berries which persist into the following winter

The backdrop to this duo is a combination of yellow and red cornus (dogwood).  The stems catch the low winter sunlight and brighten up the garden.  The harder you cut this back in the spring, the richer is the display of coloured stems in the winter and the time to do this is around now.  However, it still looks so delightful that I could not bring myself to take the loppers to it.  I will leave it a week or too longer and we can enjoy the colour until the spring garden explodes into life.

These plants – the sedum, the sweet box and the dogwood – are firm favourites of mine.  They are reliable, must-haves for the autumn and winter garden.  By the time I had tidied them up today and scooped up a pile of soggy leaves, I was tired but refreshed from being outside, even if it was only for a short while.  I only wish I had taken my camera with me!

My next tasks are to prune the wisteria and cut back the tall Verbena 'bonariensis' – but that will have to wait for another day.   

Effort

“.....all it takes is a few packets of seed and before long you will have your own, fresh home grown produce......”  As If!   Unless you are the gambling type, gardening requires some basic research before you start followed by a lot of practice and good husbandry.  This is generally known as effort and without it, gardening seldom delivers satisfaction. 

Food does not magically appear from a packet of bean seeds. If I dared to shove a few bean seeds directly into the soil instead of starting them off in pots, the slugs and mice would eat them for breakfast and even if a few plants made it above the soil, they would still need seriously engineered support from beans canes and twine to withstand strong wind and the weight of the harvest.  Of course, if the soil is not enriched with organic matter in the first place, there won’t be any beans at all! 

Given my present disability and level of pain, the effort required to do even a fraction of what I used to do in the garden, is multiplied.  I spent years telling Doc I was Superwoman but sadly this was only propaganda and I am definitely in the ‘I can only do what I can’ group of gardeners.  As such, and to my sadness, food production at Springfield will be reduced this coming season.  Traditionally in our garden, the 80/20 rule applies:  80% of the work is generated from 20% of the plot – namely, the fruit and vegetable plot.  Doc is keen to take over some of what I used to do, including the watering and husbandry but he has a lot of other garden maintenance to do.  He is not Superman either.

After much deliberating over the Modified Plan, we have decided that my role will be starting some seeds off and nurturing them into plants.  In a week or two it will be time for me to get going.  Today, Doc brought up some sieved multi-purpose compost in a trug and that will sit in the utility room to warm up.  There is also a large bag of assorted pots, root trainers and trays, plus a couple of unheated propagators and a packet of plant labels.

Tomatoes and Chilli plants will be the first off the starting blocks because they need a long season if they are to bear fruits which ripen.  I have reduced the varieties of tomatoes to a minimum to save work and I shall grow some large tubs of cherry sized Tumbling Tom (yellow and red) and Garden Pearl, together with some Romano Nano which is a meatier plum variety for cooking.  Once I get these up and about and plantlet sized, they will be grown on in the greenhouse.  When the weather turns warm and summery (wishful thinking I know) the tubs can be brought up to the terrace near the house where I can easily tend them.  The terrace is south facing and they should do well there, if not, Doc will take them back to the greenhouse.

After sowing the tomato seeds, it will be time for the Mangetout, sowed in root trainers because they like a long root run. I could start them off in the greenhouse but I find they do better in the kitchen, near the Aga and we usually achieve an earlier crop.  (I have never succeeded with autumn sowings of any of the pea family!)

A few months ago I did not think I could do any gardening at all.  But now I think I can.  My contribution will be very small but hopefully it will be significant and maybe I can gain the same kind of satisfaction all gardeners all share.  Making the effort to grow something, anything, nurtures our souls and I need all the nurturing I can get.

Paradise

Closely boarded jungle

Passionate gardeners believe in paradise, their own precious plots of paradise. However, I do wonder if we have a problem with our eyes.  For much of the 10 years Doc and I have lived at Springfield, the most striking and memorable sights have been ones like these.  Beauty seems to be a collection of fleeting moments glimpsed whilst we push laden wheelbarrows back and forth, ruining the grass in the process. 

If we don’t have a jungle, we have a building site or a mountain of logs to chop.  There are industrial sized bags of leaf mould and compost and heavy equipment like machetes, mowers, strimmers and ladders cluttering up the place.  Then of course we have huge bonfires producing horrible ash clouds and don’t even get me started on the washing out on the line.  Whatever happened to ‘England’s green and pleasant land’?  Why do gardening books never show what real garden’s look like most of time?

The boundary of one side of our garden has always been informal and amiable.  However, our neighbours have cut back some overgrown trees and Doc has knocked down the old summer house and massacred the banks of rhodies in front of our terrace, so it seems appropriate to improve the boundary with a fence.  It will give us scope for something more aesthetic in that part of the garden.  So we now have a trio of God-like men building a fence for us.  They fear no weather and by the look of the sweat on their faces, they need more than our tea and biscuits.  We salute them.

Hedges are more attractive than fences and they are good for wildlife but we have miles of them already.  It takes days to cut them every year so we also have the expense of paying someone to do it for us.  In any case, a newly planted hedge would not thrive in the shade of a row of trees.  So fencing it is and jolly good fencing it is too.  We decided that choosing the DIY store cheap and cheerful panels - which wobble in the slightest breeze - would not be value for money.  Our fencing is good quality, with workmanship that hopefully ensures it outlives us. 

‘Mick the Mole’ is the digger.  He is a dab hand at using a mattock and pick axe. G and R put the thick posts in and they all hammer in the boards together, section by section.  There is over a 100 feet of fencing and at 6 feet high, the boundary is starting to resemble the Berlin Wall.  Doc says he is going to spray paint the fence a National Trust green which, if it gets too windy, may mean everything within 20 yards will be painted National Trust green!  But hopefully, it will blend in nicely with the row of trees.

The work on the boundary means we have to re-think the water barrel and pipe in front of it.  We collect water from the gutters on the house and this not only fills 2 huge barrels behind the woodshed but gravity fills barrels down the garden too.  Since we do not want to waste this water and use it in the veg plot, Doc will have to dig a trench and sink the pipes and barrels. To use the water, we will have to use a hand pump but hard work never hurt a husband!!

Our vision is to cut back our borders to the new, green fence, re-plant the area with more decorative shrubs and perennials and build a garden room with landscaping around it which includes a pergola draped with scented climbers.  If we re-vamp the grass in front of the garden room too and make it into a lawn, we will have the perfect south-west facing paradise from which to enjoy the sunset over the valley...............

There I go again.  I must remember to remind Doc to chop those logs.

Can this really be February?

The storms have abated, although I hear on the news that the break is only temporary.  After yesterday’s whistling wind and driving rain, the sun came out and took some of the chill out of the air.  So I wandered down the garden to see what was happening.  My walking stick did not help me much.  Instead of meandering down the path, I mistakenly took the route over the lawn, to see if any bulbs were up and about but the ground was so spongy with water, my stick got stuck!   Thank goodness we live on a hill with all the water running away from the house.  I do so feel for all those families who have been flooded since the New Year. 

One of our garden club members has collected weather data for 25 years and M says that it was the wettest January in our village since her records began.  We had 26 days of rain!  Interestingly, she said we did not have as many huge downpours as we might have thought; there was steady, moderate amounts of rain throughout the month.

I managed to walk the short distance from the greenhouse to the flower bed in front of the orchard and was surprised to see the buddleia is in full leaf with new leaflets sprouting. However, the rabbits have been busy, digging holes around it.  They do make a mess but at least they appear to have left the buddleia alone.

There are snowdrops lighting up the hedgerows and the rhubarb has pushed forth its first buds. (Help, there is still some of last season's rhubarb in the freezer!) The pulmonaria dotted all over the garden are so reliable and they have been in full flower since the beginning of January.  I love their flowers and I don't know any other plant which can have both pink and blue flowers at the same time.

The stars of the current show at Springfield are the primroses that decorate and soften the edges of the steps down to the lawn.  The slope of our south-west facing garden is the perfect spot for them and they have been out to play for a while now. Today they were basking in the sunlight with their golden flowers nodding happily in the breeze.  How can anyone not feel lifted up by these simple little plants?

It may only be February but the garden has a sense of wakefulness about it.  Today it felt like March and this is fine, as long as March does not turn into February!