Rainy day relief
Monday 27th April. A flurry of activity in the village. The air has been so still recently you can hear the trees move and the rustle of the cow parsley coming through the grass. But there is rain coming, and the lawnmowers are eager to beat it. I finish putting in the new plants for the matrix planting, adding phloxes and grasses to thicken the understorey. The bronze fennel is waist high already and the opium poppies are catching up.
Tuesday 28th April. We wake to the sound of thick, heavy dripping. Thatched roofs have no gutters so the rain comes in sheets off the ends of the straw, sometimes channeled into gulleys along the folds of the building. I struggle when the sun is out, because I feel I should be doing something all the time. (My to do list is perennially longer than the hours in my day.) The rain drives me indoors to rest. I dream of banana custard, and others share their comfort food fantasies with me. Pear and chocolate crumble. Squash risotto. Marmite pasta. Apple and plum crumble. Jam sponge. Macaroni cheese. I eat none of these things, but I recognise a need that we all have right now for soothing, for being soothed.
Sometimes self care looks like Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter, and not like a motivational podcast. Sometimes it looks like watching the garden from through the kitchen window.
Sometimes it looks like calling a halt, and just stopping.
Wednesday 29th April. I have had a dreadful time with my compost this year. The bags that I bought in February and used for all my pricking out and potting up have all been awful. I should have known really. I invested heavily in beautiful, absolutely top notch seed compost, and then garden centre multipurpose for the next stage. Almost everything instantly checked as soon as they came into contact with it. Lettuces stopped growing. Tomatoes and kale simply sat there, refusing to move a millimeter.
Today, I give up on waiting for them to do anything and plant them out into recycling boxes with a mix of well rotted manure and melcourt’s sylvagrow. I plant them neck deep, and will continue to top up the level of compost in the boxes as they get taller* so they will put roots out from the stem. I swear they breathe a sigh of relief when they go in. In a day they grow more than they have in a fortnight.
*Basil is a great companion plant for tomato plants and I put a few Aristotle seedlings in the boxes. I initially felt quite smug about this, then realised that I couldn’t pile compost on top of them, so they will have to be put somewhere else.
Thursday 30th April. The ravenswing is bent double with the weight of water. Every plant has put on inches of growth in a day. The hedges are bright, lime, fresh green. The world feels different. Fresher. Cleaner. I adored the April heatwave and the days of endless sun, but it took its toll on the plants. They look positively relieved. The irises unfurl in the morning sun and their flags sparkle with droplets of the last rain shower. The first to come is Langport Wren, a locally bred iris from Kelways. (The planting scheme said it was meant to be Old Black Magic, but I never managed to source any, and I think this one is as dark and mysterious as any. Short stemmed though.)
The day is spent in a new area of the field, named the allotment. An area for rows of flowers for cutting. Only the kitchen garden has rows at the moment, all my other flowers are grown in tapestries of inter-sown plants, or meadows, or in pots and planters. The allotment is boundaried by chestnut paling fence and sits at the bottom end of the orchard. It is in the place where the compost deliveries have always been made (the lorries have to reverse down the track, tip and drive straight out again so there is only one option.) This means that it has been inadvertently no-dig for about ten years. The ground is covered with a layer of perfect, soft, clean compost. The dahlias were grown there last year, and I leave them in. Rows of species foxgloves are also starting to flower. A ready made garden.
Saturday 2nd May. The sun returns. Not strong to start with, and I use the cooler, early part of the day to turn the compost heap. I am obsessed with my compost heap. I take its temperature at least twice a day. The turning from one bay into the next, layering cardboard and dahlia stems, grass cuttings and weeds, wet and dry, green and brown, is a labour of love. I have rarely taken such care over the baking of a cake. It rewards my tending by shrinking alarmingly. (If you are a compost expert, do you water yours? The bottom layers were very dry and more preserved than composted. Should I be adding more greens or adding water?)
I clear another bed, which I had planned for squash. This was because I have grown a lot of squash plants, adore squash, and have already filled the designated, muck filled squash patch which lies at the end of the kitchen garden. This may have been pandemic-induced anxiety about preparing for a famine (Alys Fowler writes about the comfort of a pumpkin harvest here, and the fact that they need to be planted two metres apart gives some clue as to why I have run out of space.) but it is possibly just gluttony. However, the bed is one of the best, surrounded by box, now trimmed neatly after the growth spurt of this week, and just by the foot gate that leads into the field. We discuss whether it should be used for something more ornamental and my intentions waver. I make the mistake that I have made before, and google Nigel Slater’s garden for both inspiration and certainty. I am left with plain and simple envy. Can I recommend this video?
(I still haven’t decided. The bed is currently empty apart from a Kew Garden single white rose, an orlaya that escaped me, and an akebia quinata growing up an unsatisfactory mild steel dome. It will start growing weeds again if I don’t do something. soon.)
Sunday 3rd May. A neither here nor there day. Too drizzly for serious gardening. Too dry to indulge in rainy day activities. A compromise of tidying the greenhouse, sweeping the courtyard. I now have a belfast sink under the tap in the greenhouse which is disproportionately pleasing. It is currently filled with one honesty plant, which has given buckets and buckets of stems.
Some jobs are urgent, such as tying in the sweet peas and the runner beans, and erecting a mesh cover for the tuscan kale. (I am cursed with whitefly else.) A neighbour has given me a rare form of perrenial kale, Taunton Deane kale, preserved in the gardens at Knightshayes Court in Devon. It is meant to grow into something that resembles a tree and she describes it as ‘more cattle feed than cavalo nero’ but I have been trying to source one for some time, and I am delighted to see it. Until then, pea tops, wild garlic, and home made pasta form the mainstay of meals.
