Somebody Want to Dig my Garden?

It is by far my least favourite job of all time.  I hate digging the vegetable patch over in the spring.  It is the worst job of all time. 

This area is covered and weighted down with ground cover during the non-growing part of the year.  It is the last job in the autumn.  I save and fold the ground cover and stack it in a corner of the greenhouse during the growing season.

There are some anaemic weeds left and some hardy crab grass that just won't die.  It just sits there mocking me.  I know I must dig it over, but I don't want to.

All the dock weeds with their long tap roots are gone.  The veg patch is carefully edged but not quite dug completely over yet.  I start to dig, get a few forkfuls flipped over and then I find something else that needs to be done.

I HAVE to get it dug over in the next week.  It will be planting time and there must be a place for the plants to go.  I have onion sets ready to go out.  I have garden peas soaking so that they will be ready to pop in the soil.   Bean plants will be ready to go out in a few weeks.   So I had better pull my finger out.  No excuses!

This is the soft fruit patch on the east side of the house.  It is all scraped of weeds and covered over with the same sort of ground cover.  We have taken the decision to leave this ground cover where it is permanently.

There is no reason for the ground cover to come up.   It prevents NETTLES!  We seem to get a lot of stinging nettles over there.  This is a great way to inhibit them without the use of chemicals. 

In closing I would like to present the rhubarb in bloom.  It is spectacular!  I hope that the fact that it is in bloom doesn't mean the crown of rhubarb will die.

I Don't Believe in God

There. . I've said it.

I lost my faith a number of years ago.  I really struggle with it but there is a sense of loss that still haunts me.  

I think that if you had faith in God and lose it, you feel much more adrift than if you never believed in the first place.  

Religious life is still important to my family.  I just shut up when it comes to discussions about faith, God and religion in general. If somebody says they are going to pray for me, that's lovely.  I will accept all positive energy.

To go along with not believing God, I also don't believe in the devil.  

I don't have all the answers.  I used to have them when I followed religion.  That is what leaves me with a lot more questions. .. . The Bible has a ready answer for most everything.  When you hand in that set of beliefs, you also hand in all the easy answers to most of life's difficult questions.

I still believe that there is a right and wrong.  I haven't given up being moral.  I haven't become a nihilist.  

I was looking for some good arguments in support of my newly discarded beliefs.  I found it in Judaism:

There is a story told in Hassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Rabbi teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson.

One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”

The Rabbi responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

"This means," the Rabbi continued "that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’" 

Tales of the Hasidim, Vol. 2: The Later Masters [Martin Buber, Olga Marx]

This comforts me.

Scary symptoms!

I had a bit of personal drama yesterday. . .inside my own head.

I started to develop a headache.  Headaches for me can trigger a migraine so I always hit the paracetamol as soon as my head is slightly sore.   The pills seemed to do the trick until about four hours later the ache in my head came back.  Terrific.  Here we go.  I took two more tablets.  

I was reading and the pain came back at about two in the morning.  This time it was accompanied by feeling sick to my stomach.  Was I feverish as well or just cold?  

With the corona virus floating around, it is a scary time for migraine sufferers. 

It turns out that I had a whopping migraine.  I managed to prevent the worst of it but I still felt like rubbish.  My worst paranoid nightmares were flitting through my head.  What if I am infected?  What does that mean for all the people I just distributed food to?  Are my affairs in order if this is going to be it?

Perhaps it is the tap on the shoulder that I need to be MUCH more careful about how I go about volunteer work during this global pandemic.  Should I stop with the volunteer work?   I am pretty cautious about staying away from other humans, washing my hands, and not touching my face.    I wear a boiler suit that comes off when I get home.   The boiler suit goes straight in the wash.

Weeds!

There is a curse that nobody tells you about when you find yourself in possession of a house with really great topsoil.   Everything grows spectacularly well . . . even the weeds.

You can fool yourself into thinking that you will be on top of the weeds at this time of year.  The weeds are marginally easier to get out of the ground and growth really hasn't kicked into high gear yet.   I can get bits cleared of weeds and lie to myself about how the rest of the year will be.  I can imagine that with almost no further effort on my part, the vegetable beds and flower borders around my place will be a pristine and weed free oasis.

Any plant or flower can be a weed.  By definition a weed is a plant growing where you (the gardener) don't want it to grow.   Grass is encouraged  to grow but only in the area designated as "lawn".  If grass is in the driveway, it is an unsightly weed.

wild strawberries in the gravel

Strawberries are encouraged to grow in the strawberry bed.  Wild strawberries showed up in our gravel a few years ago.  I was so delighted that I left them there.   They are taking advantage and spread too much. The older wild strawberry plants have died and the novelty has worn off.  It is time for the wild strawberries to go.  I want my gravel back.

yellow nettle root

Stinging nettles are easy to manage now but wear gloves.   They are young but still sting. If you're careful you can get a lot of them out of your herbaceous border.  The roots of  the stinging nettle are a marvellous turmeric yellow.  If you are digging around in the border and see bright yellow roots they probably lead to wrinkly, fuzzy and stinging leaves.  Get it out of there!  These plants grow like bamboo when the weather warms up.

One of the worst weeds in the vegetable garden is bind weed.  I hate it!  Really the only way I have found to eradicate it in the past was using glyphosate.  As I am trying to have an organic garden, the use of that stuff is not okay and is linked to cancer.  I have been digging bind weed up.  The only way to get rid of it is to keep digging.  I have been going into the poly tunnel every day and removing emerging shoots.  I know what the shoots look like and I pounce on them immediately.
It is so pleasurable when you get an enormous root up and it hasn't broken.  This particular weed is insidious as every millimetre of  root left in the soil is a new plant! 

See!  there is a solitary inch of root that was left in the soil and it started growing a new leaf and a new root system!  If you have bind weed, you will never get it all in the first weeding session.  You have to wait a few weeks and go back and get the next batch when  the new leaves have started popping up.  It may take a year of constant vigilance to get your patch free of bind weed.

bind weed regrowing from a bit of root

This stuff doesn't sting and the roots aren't as horrid as bind weed BUT the roots do make a real dense matt under the soil.

mystery weed

I don't know what it is yet.  I will have to do some investigating.  We have plenty of it and I wish we didn't.   Thankfully it is easy to get up.

There is nothing more pleasurable when digging up a weed with a long tap root and getting the entire thing.  Weeds with taproots will regrow.  Not right away but they will come back eventually.

Comfrey is particularly tough to get rid of once the root has established.  We planted one crown of it years ago.  The bees LOVE comfrey flower and the area behind the chicken run is all but given over to comfrey.  The air is always filled with the happy buzz of hundreds of bees over there. The leaves of the comfrey plant can be harvested and rotted down with water in a big bucket and used as a brilliant organic fertiliser.

Comfrey by the chicken run

I like comfrey but if a clump shows up somewhere else, it is officially a weed and I have to dig to get rid of it!  This clump is in the stone wall in front of the house.  I tried to get it out two years ago.  I failed.  Not only did I not get it all out, I didn't do anything about it last year.  So now I have to try to get this stuff out of the wall without having to tear the wall apart, remove the weed and then rebuild the wall.

Fruit Cage preparation

A few years ago new soft fruit bushes were planted. We organised a place on the east side of the house where we keep things like ladders, bird seed bins and where the compost pile used to be.

It's a decent sized area.  We have black currants, gooseberries and blueberries.  The rhubarb crown is there too but it doesn't need any protection.  It can handle anything.

This year should see everything come into high production!  In anticipation of this, I am laying the groundwork now.

I cover the fruit with a makeshift cage made out of garden canes and net.   It works just fine.   It keeps the birds away from the berries but it does nothing to prevent weeds popping up.

Last year we had a pretty good crop but every time we went to pick berries we were either eaten up by midges or stung by the nettles.  I don't really mind a nettle sting.  It's unpleasant but . . you know. . .ouch! 

The ground was scraped of all weeds earlier and this morning, I dragged out the leftover pieces of ground cover and laid them down.  I weighted the ground cover down with rocks.   I am pleased that this is another job done. 

I will put the nets up in a few weeks.  The bushes aren't in bloom yet so we need the birds to continue to eat any bugs that may be there now.

MICE!

So the mice ate all the radish seedling the day after they popped up. 

I have not replanted them yet, but I will.  I am going to wait until there are other things available for the mice to eat before I do that.

The trick to getting rid of mice is to 1. Remove food. 2. Stop them from coming in.   3.  Put down mouse traps.    If I can't stop the mice from coming in the greenhouse, there is no point in moving on to step 3, mouse traps.

We have mice in the house too!  Yesterday was a sunny and warm day.  I saw THREE in the house. 
They were all little mice and in very different parts of the house.  The mice I saw were very little, juvenile mice.  The sort that are just big enough to leave home for the first time. 

One mouse tried to shelter under the dog.  That didn't work out so well.  The dog didn't care or move but the mouse realised that he was trying to hide in the fur of another animal.  That particular little mousey was caught in the corner of the room with a plastic cup and a bit of stiff cardboard.    I took it outside.  It will either die out there or find it's way back in.

Today I bought three new mousetraps when I went into town.  I have baited them and placed them strategically around the house. 

We normally only have mice problems in the autumn when the weather cools down. Mice want to come in where it's warm. I don't remember having a spring mouse problem before.

Gardens Have So Many Enemies

A garden has many enemies.  Sometimes I wonder if it is ever worth all the effort!

Weeds, frost, mice, rabbits, too much rain, not enough rain, slugs, aphids, caterpillars and beetles!  Let's not forget diseases.  They're all out to get my garden.

I went in to the little greenhouse to get some chicken feed and have a look at the little radish seedlings that popped up the day before.  They were GONE!  Not a bit left anywhere.  The two little volunteer tomato seedlings I had been nurturing were gone too.  Crap.

I have plenty of radish seed so I will resow them.  

I won't put tomato plants in that greenhouse until they are bigger than seedlings.  Is there a point to putting a mousetrap in a greenhouse that has open access to the outside?  It seems a bit mean.  I need a nice fat snake or a weasel.  

Please for the love of God don't tell me to get a cat.  We can't have cats. 

Things are Sprouting

Spring is marching forward at its usual pace.

I find that the fact that I am out of my nightgown by 10 am a triumph! I was up much earler and was out in my robe and slippers to check on things. 

The rhubarb is spectacular this year. It has a great big bud on it.  I don't ever remember a rhubarb blooming.  I'm sure they do. . . but this is new and must be investigated.

The peonies that I love so dearly are doing even better this year.  I am hoping that they grow from strength to strength.

I adore peonies they remind me of happy times in the Midwest.    Yes, I will be going out to weed (carefully) these flower beds.

The soft fruit section of the garden is tucked away on the east side of the house.  The soil around the base of each fruit bush has been scraped.  I swear this year I am going to put the ground cover down before the weeds can pop back up!

One of the best homemade ice cream flavours EVER is blackcurrant.  I adore it so much that I planted loads of blackcurrant bushes.   They are now about four years old.  This means that at the end of the season, I will be removing one third of the large branches.  Every year going forward I will be removing another third.

Just What I Needed

The Covid-19 virus or Corona virus has been all we hear about.  It is affecting the entire planet.  Who knows what is going to happen when it is all over. The centre of infection had moved from the source in China to Italy and Spain only to shift gears and get bigger in the US.

The numbers are terrifying and as there seem to be an unwillingness to shut things down properly. This is going to cause a delay in the pandemic ending. 

The other day I had a text quarrel with my mother. Dementia is slowly taking hold of her once sharp brain. She forgets things.  She has always been stubborn so I can't lay that particular trait at the feet of dementia.  Since the shut down, things have decided to take a nice step forward. She passes all the questions that are put to someone who is suspected of having dementia, "Who is the president?" "What is the current month?"  and she is deemed to be just fine.  It is the decision making process that is flawed. There doesn't seem to be any thought beyond what she wants at that moment.

Her senior centre has closed.  When they closed they sent people home with food parcels.  My mother promptly gave all the food to her neighbours.  She has always been generous but now her generosity is becoming a problem.  She gives her money and food away to anybody who asks and leaves nothing for herself.

I found she had gone out for a newspaper and sent her very firm messages to return home and stay there.  "I survived polio, I can survive this!" That time she went home and agreed to stay in. . . . until the following day when she decided to go visit her friend.  This prompted another round of fierce texts.  Thank heaven she can still operate a smart phone!

After she showed up at home again, I just burst into tears of frustration.  When I started to cry, I decided that I would pick at everything that worries me and have a good howl.  I miss my children.  I miss my grandchildren.  I miss my friends.  I worry about the collapse of society and famine.  Oh when I decide to feel sorry for myself, I don't mess around.

That very evening I got a call from a friend of mine who runs a charity, Dumfries & Galloway Multicultural Association.  They run a lot of support for refugees in the county among other things. Could I pick up some food donations?  Of course!

I was thrilled!  The BEST thing for snapping out of a round of self-pity is to do something for somebody else!  This was just the tonic I needed!

The local supermarket normally donates unsold food to the school.  Schools are closed and they were scrabbling around to find someone to collect the food and save it from being thrown out.

I was at the door of the supermarket just before closing.

It is shocking to see a place I visit frequently go through dramatic changes.
I put on my boiler suit and wore rubber gloves for this trip.  I am trying to minimise infecting myself.  If I am infected and not showing symptoms, I don't want to be the one infecting others.

The lovely lovely staff at the supermarket had boxes of food that was still perfectly fit for human consumption but had past its sell-by date.  They could not legally sell it.

They hated the thought of throwing it all away and were happy that somebody could make use of it.

Now then. . . what to do with all this food?!  I couldn't drive to Dumfries with it.  There really isn't a network set up in my little tiny village for this sort of thing.
The next morning I put a notice in the village hall Facebook page announcing that there was free food available!  All anybody had to do was pick it up from the village hall.  I asked people to only touch what they wanted to take, bring their own bag and be respectful of distances. 

I left the boxes of food and hoped the local village people would not be shy.  I was so glad it didn't rain!

At the end of the day, just when it was starting to get dark, I went to collect what was left and the empty boxes.

To my joy I was met with this sight!  I was SO happy that my lovely little village was able to make use of this food!    It helped snap me out of a big self-pity party.  I am reminded that doing things for others has always helped.  I also helped to end food waste! 

Anxiety Gardening

Every day the death toll grows.  Spain and Italy still have shocking numbers of people dying.  We in the UK are only a few weeks behind them and are bracing for the worst.  The numbers in the US look to be the worst of all.  Someone in the village has it.  Thankfully this person is recovering. 

The Man of the Place has to go to work.  It is an essential job.  He could probably do it from home but the local government's infrastructure can't handle the bandwidth.   He tries, his connections get too glitchy and then he has to pack up and go back into the office.

I am left fuming.  Later on I realise that my anger is based on fear.  Fear that he'll get Covid-19 and bring it home to me.  I will blame the local government for not protecting him better, for not having better bandwidth so he could have actually worked at home and blame him for not being more careful about what he touches and washing his hands.

With anxiety the best thing for me to do is . . . anything!  If I stay busy then my little brain doesn't stew on things.  I can save the worries for later when I'm trying to sleep.

Today after he left for Mordor, I got dressed, ate muesli and went outside to do stuff.

The poly tunnel cleaning was finished today.   I washed all that green off.  The job would have been a bit more pleasant in the warm sunshine but we didn't have that.  We had okay weather, very little wind and not too cold.

I dragged the garden hose over and started spraying.  I scrubbed with a soft broom and the algae came right off.

I was going to say that there wasn't much to wash, but there was over half left to do.   The entire north side and back door were pretty solidly green.  They're not green NOW!

After that was done and the hoses put away, I sorted out some strawberry plants.

When the strawberry bed was thinned out, there were loads of perfectly good strawberry plants left.  I replanted the most promising plants. 
 

I put a notice on the village hall Facebook page offering strawberry plants to anybody that wants them.  A handful of people wanted free, organic strawberry plants.

We only live a short distance from the hall so I can leave them there. I labelled them up and took them down.  I sent everybody a message so they knew the plants could be collected. We never need to meet and compromise anybody's isolation.

Doing things for others helps me to feel a bit better.

Having tackled a pretty large job, I have to think about which large jobs I want to tackle next.   The tool shed?  The attic?