As Clear as Gin, Reverend?

I run an embedded software application in this blog called 'SiteMeter' which lets me know how many followers I have, how many people have visited and from what part of the world they are from. By no means a 'Best Seller', this blog is read by about 20-30 people, mainly friends and relatives, so it chugs away gently racking up the 'hits' in its 6th year, creeping slowly up past 40,000 visits. I was amused though, that all normal posts with normal headings get that 20-30 hits but my recent post entitled "Attacking the Bank with a Pick-Axe" got, all of a sudden, 66 hits! Were I of paranoid persuasion or given to believing conspiracy theories I might start worrying about all this GCHQ and the National Security Agency stuff about Big Brother watching me, but I expect it's just that more people google expressions like 'attacking the bank' than would google baby bunnies and red algal blooms!

Which leads me neatly on to an update about said bloom which, I am happy to report at last, seems to be fading fast. We can now see almost clear to the bottom and to the planters in which the new aquatics have been set, as this black pot shows here. The water is still just a little bit cloudy and has a bit of red colour from the sediment but nothing like as bad as it was when we were in the tomato soup phase (or as someone more dramatically noted, it 'looks like you have bled an ox into it'). Not quite as clear as gin, but getting there.

We can see every stone of the beach now rather than just the shallower ones and we are delighted to note that we have a massive population of tiny, presumably newly hatched, water boatmen. If baby water boatmen eat red algae then we should be in business! What I suspect will happen is that the algae will simply die, settle to the bottom and then become part of the sediment, soon buried under blown in dust, spruce needles and any other debris which falls in.

In a lovely whiff of glories to come, our Rambling Rector rose is covered in flower buds and has opened three of these. This rose and three of increasingly dark pink in sequence are going to turn the side of our hay barn into a sheet of glorious colour at some point in the future, but that's a work in progress.

We had thought that our cat Blue, hooking that swallow out of the air a couple of months back, might put the pair off nesting in our Tígín even though we rescued the bird and think we restored him to happy full health. For a month or so we saw swallows nipping about but nobody seemed to be going into the building. Well, they are back and showing every sign of nest building again, just a bit more wary of where Blue is snoozing. This gave us a new problem as we have now had the window frame repaired by K-Dub, and glazed by me, so that the swallows had started flying in through the doorway but were trying to escape through the window. They were going to get a head ache or worse, Blue might be waiting on the inside window sill. I have therefore blocked the daylight temporarily with a couple of old coal sacks. Not beautiful, but effective.

At 2 weeks and 6 days, Goldie's babies have got active enough to start climbing over the nest box retaining-wall and exploring the grass outside. We are amused by how tiny they look against the huge bulk of meat-breed doe, Goldie. We have 5 whites, one the colour of Goldie and a darker 'rabbit-brown' one. They grow very fast and will soon start to look a bit 'cosy' in that run even though the grass area is 90 cm by 250 cm, so we are mentally designing extension runs.

Attacking the Bank with a Pick Axe

OK - I'll come clean! This is not some tale of anti-hero outlaws extracting violent revenge on the Bank of Ireland for their cheque book charges, fat-cat bonuses or other wrongs; this is a genuine earth bank. Regular readers will have met it before as the place of rest of the horse-drawn hay rake and the site of our disinterment of the rusty metal fertilizer spreader. It runs along our western boundary 'under' the hedge which divides us from Vendor-Anna's 5 acre field. It is a mess. We can only assume that for 30+ years (easily more) TK Max and TK Min used it as a dumping ground for farm junk.

The hawthorn hedge which was there is now easily 50 years old and has long since been pushed through by elder trees. The elders have dropped branches, as they do, and these have been grown up through by ancient and venerable stinging nettles. Old fashioned peat-turfs have been piled against the hedge - the old "hand-won" shape cut with a "slean" (pronounced 'shlee-un' ish); a long narrow spade with a knife coming off one side at 90 degrees to give you an L-shaped cut. These have either been deliberately or accidentally covered with black silage-bale wrap, entombing them (so at least they are dry-ish!) before topsoil has been bulldozed (?) against and over them to make the bank. Big round bales of hay have at some stage been leant against this.

You'll know that we have worked really hard here since moving in battling with various bits of the garden, cutting down tall stuff, mowing, pruning and generally trying to force it to be a garden rather than a jungle, but 'The Bank' we have to admit, has been a bit neglected. The Bank looms over us like a dark cloud, clearly visible from the big pond, the pond garden and the orchard. Its thickets of stinging nettles rise up from the rotting hay-bales and the Queen Anne's Lace (Cow Parsley) tries to out-height the unkempt hedge. The holes we have made extracting the spreader and un-burying the hay rake look like tiny, pathetic breaches in the curtain-wall of a castle.

Now, though, I am done pond-digging and I am on top of weeding in the 'allotment', so I have decided to add it to my 'hour-a-day-whatever-the-weather' job list, the not-so-pleasant tasks I make myself do in order to earn the more pleasurable jobs or a rest or a cup of coffee! Liz is also involved and gets stuck in when she can. It is hard, heavy and frustrating work because you just can't get a shovel down through the nettle roots, baler twine, plastic wrap and bits of tree.

The only way to beat it seems to be to rip into it with a pick axe, pulling loose tufts of root and then going through it by (gloved) hand sorting what you can get loose into types and degrees of usefulness - hay and green weeds to the compost, metal, twine, wrap and nettle root to the non-recycle bin, stones and rocks to the reserve rock pile, wood and turf sods for burning if big enough and that lovely top soil onto various new beds. By slow degree we will dismantle the bank dropping its level to one of 'raised bed near hedge' and un-ship all the rubbish. It is hot work, as I said, and the 9-week old chickens quickly adopted the bare crumbly top soil I am exposing, for dust bathing. Watch this space for progress.

Meanwhile, as I also said, the allotment bit is under control and I am delighted with it. It is better looking and more productive, seemingly, than any attempts I made in Kent (I have loads more time here) and is streets ahead of last year's flat cultivation, washed out, as it was, by the masses of rain and prey to crop failures all around.  I have today been able to pick some first over-wintered broad beans.

These bushes were almost completely wiped out by the terrible drying east winds which blew for 3 weeks continuously in Feb/March but have recovered well and are now 3 feet high and covered in pods low down on each stem. The pods are not as full as I would like as there were very few bees about back when these guys were in flower, but that is the kind of thing we will help as we get more into the 'wildlife garden' side of things - the self seeding insect friendly flowers and so on.

To this end, a huge Thank You to a Facebook friend who has picked up the nickname (on FB) of 'Backchat Black'. He lives in Spalding (Lincs) and is mad keen on this kind of gardening and has posted me seeds of teasel, comfrey, pot marigold, tansey and feverfew. Also to Pud Lady who is sending me regular supplies of the free gift seed packets which come with subscriber gardening magazines. Between us we should achieve a riot of colour and a heady buzz of insects. The photo (left) is of a common spotted orchid now appeared in our orchard meadow. We are on the starting ramp.