Having moved house during the blog’s hiatus, I now have the responsibility for the upkeep of a fair sized garden as well as the allotment, and being more of a farmer than a gardener (as I explained here), it’s taking some coming to terms with.
I suppose you could call it a cottage garden, in that there are many beds of “herbacious perennials”, as they say on Gardeners World, which I really don’t know much about. Here's a couple of shots from earlier in the year.
My inner control freak is telling me to just dig them up and replace them with something more manageable, like turf ! However I am resisting the urge, and just letting things be for this season, whilst I at least learn what things are.
As a consequence, the allotment, which has been a little neglected this past year, is getting a spring clean, in summer, to within an inch of its life. You can almost see the weeds cowering as I march down the plot with freshly sharpened hoe at the ready, passing my trusty leeks standing proudly to attention.
As for the snails, that have been having a field day with the wet weather and my laziness of late, weapons of molluscular destruction have had to be deployed, yes slug pellets. I’m reluctant to use them, but however many lettuce munchers I chuck into next doors plot, they never seem to diminish.
Talking to one of the old fellas, he tells me that they actually return home to the plot, “you know, like pigeons”, he said, and that he’d actually done an experiment where he’d marked one with some nail varnish , took it a good distance from his plot, and within a day it had returned.
Now that’s just weird, I mean, what the heck’s he doing with nail varnish down at the allotments !
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