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.
