Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Asparagus and a trip down Reminiscing Street






 A few year yet until it can be eaten....


I’m feeling spring in the air. 
Last week’s warm sunny weather gave me motivation to jump out of bed in the morning and head off straight into the garden. Such enthusiasm hasn’t been seen in the house since this time last year when I was creating the frog pool in the polytunnel. 

It’s more of a tidy up. I’ve been chopping back out of control jasmine on the patio, out of control groundcover, out of control weeds, you get the idea. Most of the jobs I’ve been doing are “out of control” ones and really need addressing before any seed sowing can be done. 

One fiddly job was to clear the weeds away from the young asparagus plants. It’s only their second year of growth and the young tender shoots emerging from the ground are much too small to be eating. I’m going to be leaving them for a few years until they are well established so the energy can go back into the plants to help them establish. I’ve never grown such a long winded crop before but I’m sure they will be worth the wait. 

I’ve cleared out most of the pots too. Most of the plants have died back with the frost except for a few fuchsias, which I can repot later. I’ll be using fresh soil and compost as there are a lot of overwintering grubs in containers that love to nibble on new roots.

A Million Geraniums
 All of the geraniums have died back too so I won’t have any cuttings to save and grow on for later in the year so I’ll need to go out and buy some plugs. I have grown them from seed before but for the small amount I need it’s not worth the effort.   It reminds me about when I used to work for the local council in Nottingham. There were so many parks in the shire that needed a splash of colour in the flower beds that they used to employ a woman permanently to grow, maintain and propagate geraniums for the year. That’s one full time job, just for geraniums. She had her own greenhouse, heating system, and even threw in a rented house into the bargain. I’ll have to check to see if the jobs still there, I wouldn’t mind that myself.

Reminiscing Street
As I am on Reminiscing Street, I remember having a few long term jobs to myself when I worked for the council parks department. Job one was digging a trench well over 1000 yards long across a hillside to put pipes in. I’m a bit fuzzy on the details but the size of the trench would make you believe they were laying oil pipelines.  It needed to be over four feet deep and the ground was very wet and sticky.  I was there for three weeks on my own until one day I just cracked. The sheer physical hardship, loneliness and lack of progress made me walk off the job and go to the nearby trainline and watch the carriages go by.   

I did that for four full working days until anyone even noticed I wasn’t digging. They put on another worker who could actually use a shovel and I just watched him for three weeks until he finished the pipeline trench. A digger would have done it in less than a day. 

Shovelling
The second challenge I was faced with was thankfully inside a large storage bay so I did manage to stay dry.  I was given the task of shovelling 75 tonnes or rough soil through a screen to grade it for topsoil for the bowling greens.  I did it and I was elated, but it was short lived. My reward was a second delivery of another 75 tonnes of soil to do the whole thing again. It took me a long time and I’m sure there’s an automated sieve out there that could have also done the work in one day.
I’m of course not implying that my working career in gardening started before machinery did the work for us. Lawnmowers had been invented.  I remember six weeks of my life was taken up defining the grass edges on park pathways with a half-moon tool. Every clump had to be dug out and removed. There’s a machine that does that now and I reckon it would take less than a day to do that job as well. 

Thankfully the smaller jobs in the garden haven’t been automated yet, back to weeding the asparagus.

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