It is a really good year for strawberries and we are submerged in a sea of juicy pink ripeness. This morning I spent an hour in glorious sunshine, harvesting the bounty. We eat them whilst we pick, enjoy a handful of them on muesli and yogurt for breakfast. We eat them for lunch, a snack in the afternoon and with ice cream for tea. I puree them for the freezer to make mousse later in the year and to stir into porridge during the winter. Later today I will make up a batch of fruity frozen yogurt full of natural sweetness. If we could eat strawberries with gravy for dinner, we would. With such an abundant crop we don't even need to worry about the slugs and snails because there is plenty for everyone. Gardening doesn't get better than this.
We have tentatively stepped into the world of dahlias. Doc and I were stocking up with twine and tomato feed at a local garden centre when were attracted to some pots of vibrantly coloured dahlias. The red and white ‘buy one get one free’ sign clinched the deal.
Up until then, all I knew about dahlias was that they are tender tubers, a traditional cut flower and grown for showing. I also thought, mistakenly, that if the dahlia is a show flower this must mean they are difficult to grow. However, with a little research I discover that this is not true.
Dahlias are easy to grow, low maintenance and excellent as cut flowers for the house. They have a long flowering season, from June until the late autumn. They are grown from tender tubers, which are similar to bulbs but ‘sausage’ shaped. They have to be lifted and stored in a frost free place for the winter which is why we shall be growing them in pots. I have read that they are hungry so the pots are fairly large and the compost is rich. Also, the tips of the plants need to be pinched out to produces lots of vigorous growth and the maximum amount of blooms.
The latest additions to our plant family are ‘Happy Single Princess’, with single daisy-like white flowers and yellow centres, and ‘Happy Single First Love’, which is a single salmon pink, with yellow and orange centres. (Where do these awful names originate?) The foliage is impressive, the dark burgundy colour sets off the dazzling flowers to perfection.
We shall feed our new dahlias with a balanced feed ever two weeks, dead head them regularly and stake them to support the stems in the wind. As soon as autumn frosts threaten the plants, I shall clean away any soil clinging to the tubers and trim the stems back to 15 cms. Apparently, you have to stand them upside down in a cool place to dry off before packing in a tray with peat-free compost. If I leave the crown slightly exposed I will hopefully be able to see when it leaps into action next year.
Doc would like to have a go at propagating new tubers from the existing plants. This entails separating the sausages (!) into portions which have both roots and shoots and then growing them on separately. However, for the time being we are happy that our new dahlias are happy. To some people they are vulgar and gaudy, for us they just smile.
Today, Doc was weeding a patch of ground near the bank of rhododendrons and he inadvertently disturbed a wasp nest. He was irritated at finding yet another nest but not as irritated as the wasps who were trying to finish building it. No sooner had Doc found the nest than I heard those familiar nibbling noises whilst I was filling a watering can from the water butt next to the greenhouse.
We first came across this garden phenomen a couple of years ago and then, the idea of wasps munching our greenhouse was amusing. We also thought that it is important to see wasps as a vital part of the garden's natural balance because they devour pests such as aphids and caterpillars. However, we now have an awful lot of furry vertical lines etched into the wooden window frames and their munching is extremely annoying. Shooing them away is useless because they return a minute or so later, usually with reinforcements. Once they sink their mandibles into the wood, there seems to be no stopping them.
Although our greenhouse is large we don’t like the wasps free loading at our expense. One of these days we will walk down the garden and instead of seeing an abundant greenhouse full of tomatoes and peppers we will see a pile of sawdust and broken glass. The cost of replacing the greenhouse would be considerable but our tenderly nurtured vegetables are priceless.
Apparently, this problem is unusual but not unheard of and occurs mostly where there is a high wasp population such as in orchards. The wasps look for wood which they chew into paper and use it to build or repair their nest. They will consume trellis panels, wood planters, sheds, fences, decking and furniture - and of course greenhouses. Cedar is particularly delicious because the natural oil in the wood has an attractive smell which makes me think that we should have bought an aluminium greenhouse. I seem to remember that it would have been a lot cheaper...
There are products which can be painted on the wood at the start of the season – when the little blighters are most active - and these contain repellents such as eucalyptus oil, menthol and citronella. However, this is impractical for larger areas and I am told that the best solution is to find and eradicate the nest - or nests.
So, actually, Doc has done us a favour in finding this new nest. He has now written ‘evict wasps’ on the Garden To Do list. In the meantime, I have installed the temporary deterrent. I hang a jar of water by the water butt, containing a dollop of my very best raspberry jam. There are a dozen or so wasps in there already. And when I shut the greenhouse door, I will do so very carefully, just in case it is about to fall down.
The arrival of June brought sunshine, heavy rainfall and longer daylight hours so we now have a garden full of turbo-boosted plants, weeds and slugs. There is no time to linger and admire the roses. We have work to do. Doc cannot keep up with grass cutting and I have doubled my efforts tending the vegetable beds.
I need to be in several places at once and the garden is very large. My continuing foot pain means I can no longer run hither and thither fetching this, that and the other so I carry a basic tool kit with me at all times. This standard tool kit comprises of a large trug with handles, a bucket for the weeds, a kneeling mat, secateurs, a standard trowel, twine and scissors. Optional items are a wheelbarrow, hoe and a chemical killer - the latter being the only weapon against our ground elder and bindweed.
My insistence in having this particular kit with me may imply that I am a fastidious gardener and take care of my tools. However, nothing is further than the truth. I take no special interest or pleasure in any item of gardening equipment. As long as a tool does the job, that is fine by me. I have never sharpened a hoe or secateurs in my life and the pair of scissors lost their edge years ago. (In fact it is often quicker to use my teeth to sever a length of twine.)
My father used to tut tut at my laziness but he invested so much time and effort in conditioning his tools that there was no time to do any actual gardening. In any case doing any hoeing would spoil the hoe. I know that as such a keen gardener I should be ashamed of my bad habits but I am not. I don’t want to take out a largish mortgage to buy the classiest, sharpest pair of secateurs on the market and lovingly oil them after every use. There is a lot to do in this gardening life and I don’t want to waste time polishing anything. It sounds too much like outdoor housework. There are cheap and cheerful tools at the garden centre which I can mistreat for a couple of years and then replace.
Maybe I would value my tools more if there wasn’t the constant threat of misplacing them on such a large the plot. The kneeling mat disappeared for weeks so I used a rolled up old cardigan until I found the proper one under the Acer tree. Doc found one of our many trowels – the black one with the rattly handle - in the compost bin and it was still in perfect condition despite languishing there for a year.
I used to wish manufacturers would produce their wares in bright colours so they are easier to spot a few hundred feet from the shed. They must have heard me muttering because girly peptobismol –pink is very trendy at the moment. I have invested in a new set of yukky coloured tools and so far nothing has walked. Neither does Doc snaffle any of them either. Although he fully supports equal opportunities, apparently he couldn’t bear to be seen using a pink trowel.....
