Mary, Mary, (2)

This post continues on from "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" and is my Garden report. Mary Mary (1) saw us in the west field enjoying the vegetable crops.

Moving on round we come to the 'secret garden', the first bit Dad tried to start gardening in while we were all still living in the caravan, snatching the odd hour of gardening opportunity by getting up early and getting done before the house build work started at 0800. This has turned out to be way too much of a leafy shaded glade to do any vegetable gardening in now that the leaves have come on the beech to the west and the ash to the east. Pretty much everything went all spindly and etiolated although the spuds did, amazingly crop. This was even though they were hit badly by blight all of a sudden - one day perfect healthy green leaves and when we looked again about 3 days later, no living tops at all. Luckily, by then, the spuds must have formed underground because we were able to dig a few meals worth of nice, if rather small, new potatoes with very few blighted tubers.

The main problem with the secret garden bit is the HUGE black-spruce trees which we know from Vendor Anna L were planted by TK Max in the late 50's or early 60's as saplings for a windbreak. Muppet! Apparently according to our man "Oliver Splits" local tree surgeon / tree feller / log splitting contractor these were planted all over County Roscommon and many many houses now have these huge tress all roughly the same age and size. Keeps him in work, he says. The are called "Dale trees" locally but Oliver agrees with me they are probably black spruce (Picea Mariana) as identifiable from the long cones, the flattened leaf shoots, the blue cast to the new foliage and the white bands under the individual needles. These trees are now a good 60' tall and would need some kit more serious than Dad's little chainsaw to get them down. Oliver reckoned 2 days work for him and a mate (€300 a day, ker-ching!!!!!) plus hire of a cherry-picker machine at €140 and that would be without him splitting them up for logs, or tidying away the trashy small branches. Big shredders are also €140 a day to hire. €1000 or so to make a veg garden tidy and use-able? We think not. Dad will just abandon that space as a veg plot and 'do it all' in the raised beds. The chickens can have it as their run.

 In other news, the keyhole bed we described in an earlier post is now complete and filled and just needs something growing in it. Look carefully though and you can see the small green splash of a thyme plant which came from Steak Lady along with all the other cuttings and which got built into one of the cracks as the outer ring wall was being assembled. And finally, just for fun, the 'cauldron' of snap dragons now doing very well outside the front door. These plants were from a worn out, bedraggled old tray of exhausted, dried out, pot bound specimens which someone cast off to us. They did OK didn't they! I think you could say they are fully recovered and we hope they will self-seed around the place. The other matching cauldron has bright yellow winter pansies in it. We look very colourful out front at the moment.

And that concludes the garden update.
Deefs

When is a broody hen not....

Into the start of August we finally get some decent weather and can start spending proper time in the garden. Wandering Wendy decides this is also a good time to go broody and is spending long sessions on her eggs in the nettle patch. On the 2nd she's out there from 0930 and still sitting there at the end of our day's gardening at 1630, so Mum and Dad decide she's now serious. We believe she's got a clutch of 6 eggs in there or maybe 7. There were 6 in there yesterday and she's been sitting all day. It comes on to rain a bit, so M+D decide to gather her and her eggs up and move them to the safety and dry of the calf house. Dad creates a 'broody box'  and lines it with new hay. Dad grabs WW and Mum the eggs and we all process back to the calf house. WW is not too happy with this disturbance and 'growls' at Dad in the special way broodies have. This is a GOOD SIGN.  WW is settled on her eggs after a bit of a battle of wills and we retreat quietly to await developments. Will she stay put?

Meanwhile, as I said, we all enjoy some good gardening time.  The two big old perished tractor tyres we inherited from TK Min get that cliché, white paint on the treads and are filled with soil from the inherited pile as planters. One gets a purple verbena which will be, we hope, mother of many a self-seed, the other a perennial wallflower. They will get other stuff, or course but they look quite nice sitting down by their gate pier.

We have almost written off the 'Secret Garden', Dad's first attempt at veg plot, done before we knew just how shaded that would get under the trees, but also before Mike-the-Cows ploughed the ground for the allotment. The beans and other stuff there in has grown weedy and thin and wasted away in the shadows, but the spuds, surprisingly have survived and avoided blight, so we have hopes that we may, after all, get a few tiddlers off the patch. Various new climbing roses appear along the hay barn wall and in the kitchen garden (New Dawn, Joseph's Coat, High Hopes, etc) and the tubs in the yard get love-in-a-mist, Lucifer crocosmia and a yellow potentilla.

By lock up time, Wandering Wendy has abandoned the eggs and made her way through the outbuilding, including climbing over an internal wall, and is with the other 'hins' all be it outside the wire. Dad gives up on her broodiness for the night and allows her back in to sleep with her sisters, The eggs get moved to the nest box in the coop, in case she should show an interest tomorrow (She doesn't). Dad's internet poultry discussion-group all seem to be saying that this weather has made a very bad year for anything going broody. These are very young 'hins'. Maybe next year. The eggs are gathered up and used up in the normal way, first checking each one in case of the start of baby chicks.