This is another guest blog from our friend Andrew who lives, and gardens, in the Morvan.
By Andrew
I expect most gardeners have days when they go out in to the garden to do a particular task, but find themselves doing something completely unrelated and unplanned. This happened to me yesterday: I got distracted by some brambles around a Rhododendron I have being trying to nurture into flower, which is in an awkward, shady and cold place at the top of the bank along our stretch of stream. (We actually discovered last year that the flower buds were being eaten by visiting deer, so I have also covered in in gauze for the moment).
I found that these brambles, with all the rain we have had recently are very easy to pull up, often coming away with an impressive few meters of root with new shoots along it. The bramble (Rubus Fruticosus) is an impressive, tough and resilient plant, but in parts of our garden is just too invasive.
On the other hand we are happy to have a vast area of brambly spinney just beyond our border which teems with birds at this time of year, especially robins, tits, sparrows and wrens…. So I pulled out a few, then a few more, and three hours later, with lacerated hands despite my gloves and a badly scratched nose I had cleared the entire 50m bank! It was hard work, but satisfying and somehow reassuring to know they will grow back and nature will eventually win this battle. And how can I not mention that blackberry jam is by far my favourite? But picked from the hedgerows around us rather than from the garden!
I had intended to benefit from the beautiful spring sunshine and to start topping up my raised beds with compost and generally tidying them up ready for planting soon (hopefully), so that became today’s job. I am very pleased with my compost, black, moist and friable. It seems all the hard work filling and turning the 4 x 1 cubic metre bays is paying off, but of course nothing is actually growing in it yet… One of the raised beds I had made from scratch in 2 hours from the usual discarded pallets, cardboard and a handful of roofers’ nails. I now have 10 raised beds, each just over a metre square. Over the last couple of years these have been filled and topped up with probably over 10 cubic meters of the homemade compost.
The days have been lovely, but the nights are still very cold here (minus 2c this morning) so its still a bit early to sow or plant most things. I have a couple of trays of chilli and coriander seeds started in the house, and a tray of lettuce on the heated mat in the poly-tunnel along with the remains of my over-wintered cuttings that managed to survive the winter. The garlic is looking good in the garden, at last, as well as the leeks, and I have risked sowing some broad beans, carrots and radishes. The autumn sowing of broad beans, along with the brassicas and my first attempt at green manure, haven’t survived the -12c nights and subsequent incessant rain of winter…
Gardening is never easy in the Morvan, but at last things are starting to grow again and thankfully the winter is behind us and we can start to look forward to warm and fruitful days of spring and summer.
La Boutonniere 