Jungle Clearance

Another chunk of jungle bashed into submission.

I apologise in advance for a bit of a thin report this time. The weather has finally turned nice enough to get out into the garden and life since the last post has been all about weeding. Unless you want a piece entitled "My Battle with Creeping Buttercup, Silverweed, Couch Grass, Docks, Daisies and Plantains", I will struggle to put any drama into the words. The weeding was long overdue but I hate getting the knee pads on and squelching around with the wet threatening to come over the sides of the pads and soak my knees. I have done hours and hours of just plain hand-weeding, bits of several days from around 08:45 to 11:45. The compost piles are mountainous.

A buddleia in a not very sensible position. 

The good weather also attracted Liz out, and, 2-handed, we have been able to get on with some projects. The first of these was to do battle with what we thought was our last piece of 'jungle'. These little corners of rubbish seem to occur in all our gardens - you mean to tackle them but you've no time right now, so I'll stack this 'stuff' in it for the present; of course, you end up with mini 'glory-holes' of stacked canes, sheets of plastic and other junk with brambles and nettles trying to grow through them and all your locals weeds running rampant.

The patch now clear but re-sheeted to hold it. 

Ours was a ten foot wide, 20 foot long gap between the polytunnel and the raised flower bed. When we bought the place this hole was, like several other bits, full of well rotted bales of hay and straw and the 'earth' was a mess of half-buried silage wrap, rocks and old peat-turf, overgrown with a jungle of nettles, brambles and long, lank, wet grass. In the short term, we decided to just sheet it over with black plastic and use that dry, black surface to dry out the chunks of turf I was pulling out of the earth bank at the time (I still am!). Most of this turf got dried and has been burned, but the smaller fragments sat on the plastic through a couple of winters and, as you'd expect, started to grow their own ecosystem of grass and weeds.

The roses are now fighting back after the wet and producing
buds which actually manage to open (!)

The sheeting I had put down did not come right to the edges, so the biggest rat's nest of nettles grew there, I have ever seen - stems were 5-6 feet high and the roots, once finally extracted were more than an inch thick at the centre of the clump. On the outer edge of the gap was the chicken wire we had put surrounding the flower bed to keep the birds off and (again no surprise) the bottom of this had become a tangle of new weeds. We now have the bed better established and 'peopled' with sturdy perennials which can cope with chickens rooting around under and between them, so we decided to do away with the wire mesh in the same project.

A couple of days of fun, then, with fencing pliers, hammer, shears, pick axe (to break open the rotted bales and get the nettle roots out), pointy shovel, rake, stone-buckets, builders one-tonne bulk bag for the weeds and a barrow for the use-able turf. It is now cleared of nasties, dug over, stone-picked and turf-picked, raked smooth and now re-sheeted with better, flatter (and big enough) black sheeting to await the Autumn and its annexing by the existing raised flower bed. Yes, we have more plans.

One of last year's 'Million Trees' oaks is
now getting cracking.

The big bed is now down a couple of years and the plants in it have started to show their true, Roscommon potential. By that, I mean that some of them are surprising us by being bigger, taller and wider than we have ever seen them grow in, for example, Kent. We have only ever had limited success and poor growth before with such as Philadelphus (Mock Orange) and Crocosmia (Lucifer). Here, these plants are huge - the orange has 5 foot long whips coming out in all directions. A Buddleia we squeezed in at an edge (unwise) us now trying to vault across the grass path. Crocosmia is shouting 'HOT RED' in great 4-5' tall fans, one of which is near the front of the bed and hiding all sorts of goodies behind it. The lupins and sweet rocket have now gone over but stand as tall spikes of seed heads which we hate to tidy up but probably need it.

Some rose prunings make it indoors. 

We took all this in while working there and decided that we need to do some moves and shuffling as well as some evictions. The big Buddleia and Philadelphus will be headed to the woodland edge once they go quiet in Autumn. The 'Lucifers' will need lifting and dividing but we will also take the opportunity to move them back a bit, almost certainly into the cleared jungle patch. Some shorter plants may be moved forward. We do not want a rigid gradation by height; we like tall see-through stuff like purple verbena, teasel and Japanese anenome to be scattered about but the beds does need a bit of a sort out. We are currently looking at a way of mapping it all so that when we go to dig things up in October, we can tell our crocosmia from our gladioli and we can distinguish between various 'dead' brown clumps.

Left to right, the 5 week old turkeys, one of the 9 week old turkeys,
a young Guinea Fowl and the olde Marans hen.

Meanwhile, the newest hatch of turkeys have reached 5 weeks and looked big enough, to us, to cope with Soldier the cat, so we have let them out free range. We were delighted to see that the 'Gang of Four', our 2 other turkey poults and the young Guineas straight away adopted them into their gang, rather like older siblings who are asked by their parent to 'mind' the babies. There was no pecking order stuff and no harrassment. The 2 newbies were quickly absorbed and the youngsters all now travel around as a gang of six. For a couple of nights we rounded the new ones up back to their rabbit run in the evening and shut them in, but on the third evening all six went off to roost in the turkey house and looked so cosy together that I let them be and shut them all in together. Everybody survived and now I can tidy up the rabbit runs and stash them back away somewhere dry. Our 2015 breeding season is over. The remaining adolescents just need to grow up in the flock. Only 'Hen with Two' remains in any kind of kindergarten arrangement, with Mum still looking after the 5 week old babies and taking them off to the camping-toilet gap in the Tígín each night. She will soon move into the proper house, we expect.

Male turkey poult (?) at 9 weeks.

The older turkey poults, now 9 weeks, are both looking, to our inexpert eyes, like males (Toms). They have the start of the flap of loose skin at their throats (the wattle) and we have seen both of them doing lttle play versions of Dad's display - tails up and wings down. This does not matter of course - these are still purely meat birds but possibly the males grow faster than the hens. Que Sera.

Jam and Jerusalem

18 days in and we are still very much enjoying (and being amazed by) this lovely dry spell and we are getting as much outdoor time in as we can while it lasts. The current forecast from "Wet Éireann" (as it was becoming called, really it is 'Met Éireann', of course, the Irish Met Office) is that the rain returns on Wednesday but we can't complain now for a while - we've had the best innings ever for a Feb/March nearly-three-week spell.

My first 2 pics here show a before and after of the old compost site mentioned in a previous post. You can see what I mean about the rather unsightly and rushed construction based around an old fence line and loaded with compost more as a way of suppressing nettles and brambles than anything else. The triumph of hope over experience? When did you ever manage to kill nettles by piling 'rubbish' on top of them?

With the compost moved you can see that the space has now been leveled for use as a flower bed and is, in fact, already planted with some Crocosmia (Lucifer) which we had bought in Lidl's. The third pic shows the neater new arrangement. The 'good stuff' is held in behind the wooden paling fence and the nettle-y rubbish, now buried under some rabbit cleanings, held in by corrugated sheet. The chickens are on hand, as ever, to inspect. They loved it - all those worms! Our friend and Mentor, Anne actually grows worms in wormeries as a source of vital trace elements and key base proteins for their (many!) hens and estimate that each hen needs only 7 worms a day to meet that need. Anne was in that business (organic eggs) in a 'former life' and has all the scientific knowledge backing it up. On that basis, our hungry worm-guzzlers have had about a month's worth.

Along the outer edge of our Kitchen Garden we have created a row of currant and berry bushes which we hope will grow to form an edible hedge. I have seen this done before in Kent while judging the Environmental Action category of the Calor Gas "Village of the Year" competition where the team making it happen called it their Jam and Chutney Hedge. They had damsons, gooseberries, currant bushes and more in theirs. We do not have damsons in ours but the name still fits except that we started jokingly calling it the 'Jam and Jerusalem' Hedge and that name has now stuck.

So far this 'hedge' has been a bit of a piece-meal affair with the bushes going in at roughly the correct spacing as and when we bought or were given them. Liz today decided that this needed to be a proper 'project' and the line of the hedge should be more formally marked out with stones and weeded. She's been getting on with that, barrowing weeds round to the new composts, robbing stones from up the left side of the hay-barn and gathering good topsoil from the hay-rake bank. With this area being still on the flat and not yet a raised bed, it has been a damp job even after the days without rain.

Our main weeds in there are creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) and good ol' couch grass, neither of which will happily let go the soil around their roots when damp. By comparison, I have been weeding around my allotment raised beds and I am delighted to find that the soil there has dried nicely enough to crumb up easily at the touch of a shuffle-hoe, and to fall easily off the buttercup, dock, annual grasses and nettles which are 'my' main weeds. It is pure joy weeding down there. We look up occasionally or call 'Coffee?' across the orchard to one another, and then meet up at the chairs by the nearly-pond to chat and sup in the warm sunshine.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Time, I feel, for a garden update. You've had house building, projects, chickens and small animals to saturation point now, surely. Time to put down that trowel, take a seat in any one of the nice sunny sitting positions about the place and maybe accept a glass of chilled pink and take the weight off. Look around you, see how much we have achieved in such a short time, bearing in mind that we only started in May, that three of the railway sleeper raised beds only went in in June, and allotment raised beds are only since July and we only started attacking the "bit we don't talk about" (BWDTA) in August. Some bits we're very pleased with; other bits have been disappointing or are still very much 'work in progress'.

The front lawn is an area where we have definitely won just by dint of almost weekly mowing. When we moved it was a rough  area of rushes and tall thistles and creeping buttercup but the rushes proved to be shallow rooted and could almost be sliced off the turf and the rest is no match for regular mowing. We had one setback where some cattle got in from the road and pock marked it with hoof dents but Dad has put hoof-sized wedges of turf in these and in the rush-digging holes. We like the 'huge expanse of green' look and will probably keep it like this, with just the low box hedge up at the house end.

Against the front wall we started a small flower bed intending it to be filled with the 'imports' from the Faversham garden we love so much - Californian and welsh poppy, hollyhocks, erigeron (Spanish Daisy), love in a mist. The Calif. poppies have started to do OK and we hope will now self seed, but the welsh and the erigeron never showed. The hollyhocks have done some nice rosettes of foliage against the wall so we are hoping for some action next Spring.

Just inside this wall on the left was where we put the old inherited TK Min tractor tyres in which we planted purple verbena and a perennial wall flower but have since added a strong erigeron plant we found at a local garden centre. Behind these covering a goodly area went 3 crates worth of assorted cuttings and slips from Steak Lady, under planted with 2 generous nets of assorted daffs. Whether these poor things will love us for sticking them in Roscommon's cold wet clay, we don't know yet, but we live in hopes.

Continuing our clockwise perambulation we pass through the BWDTA and into the west field. The BWDTA was called that because it sat looking balefully back at us when we watched the sun go down over the 5 acres field out to our west, a mess of tall weeds, dumped heaps of spoil (one of soil mixed with coal, anthracite and stones), long rotten and overgrown hay bales, black plastic. Eventually we could stand its embarrassment no longer and Dad was put to work with the old Sussex 'grass-hook' scythe to cut off the trash on top and expose the actual topography underneath. Then we'd know what we'd got. The spoil heap was sorted through to extract the useful fuel and good stones and the soil could then be spread out flat.

'What we'd got' turned out to be a reasonably flat saucer shaped parcel of land which was a bit boggy and had been used as a tractor route from front garden to west field(s) so was also a bit smeared up and not well drained. We had a bit of a 'light-bulb' moment and could see a big pond! Mum and Dad are keen wildlife gardeners as you know, and have always had ponds. We also know that under a foot or so of good soil round here is good ol' sticky yellow Roscommon Clay so we are hoping that if we can dig down to this and then puddle what's there and smear it up the sides, we may end up with a waterproof pond which does not need a liner. That's the plan anyway.

2 bits we are now delighted with are the kitchen garden (with it's railway sleeper raised beds) on the immediate west end of the house and the allotment now we have started to turn it into dug, 'lazy' raised beds. In both of these the veg has been enjoying the raised status, up out of the cold, damp, waterlogged flat soil and we have started to see some good crops of beans (broads, French, climbing French and runners) and peas, of green cabbage and red cabbage, curly kale and 'Cabalero Nero' (black) kale, as well as various salad leaves and pak choi type stuff. This is all a bit late. The leeks only went into the nursery beds as seeds in June and are only now, in September, reaching transplantable size, but Dad has optimistically planted out a raised bed full in the allotment (pictured) and these may or may not produce an edible crop in the remains of the summer.

I am getting a bit nervous of the size and vulnerability of this post as yet unpublished, so I am actually going to pause here and publish this bit, just in case of kittens climbing on my keyboard. I will continue in the next post.