Taking down the height.

Our strange weather is continuing, lovely sunny days interrupted by brief but heavy rain drops.  If you get your timing right, and keep one eye on the sky you can get some really productive gardening done in each short burst of sunshine.  And when it’s raining – you can make muffins.

I remade my pumpkin muffins again and they were really good…. Except for one thing:  My nutmeg was very fresh as I had to buy some more and it has quite an overwhelming flavour.  If I was determined to get these muffins right I’d make them again with less nutmeg.  But I’m not going to make any more at this stage.

With the surprisingly warm sun on my back I surveyed my garden to decide what to do.  It soon became quite obvious.  The peas the mice forgot are growing up nicely and will soon need a home.  The old pea bed was a tangled mess of trellis, netting, dead and dried pea plants and weeds.  Not the kind of des res for peas who have survived against the odds and managed to avoid being destroyed by greedy nasty vermin.  They need somewhere with light fluffy soil, where full sun can warm their faces, where they can grow big and strong without being tormented by weeds.  My peas deserve the best quality of life I can give them.

So I untangled the nets from the bamboo poles and unwound the weeds and put the poles and nets away.  The peas I grow in the warmer months are tall peas that bask in the summer warmth and reach for sun to ensure their pods get best chance to grow big and fat.  However the peas I grow in the winter are short and this works well as while they suited to growing in the cooler weather, the frost can bother them a little.  Being short makes it much easier for a frost cloth to be tossed over them should it be required.

I’m not sure if it is because I have lovingly worked the soil for several years, or recent weather conditions have given the soil that perfect combination of not too wet and not too compacted to make the extraction of weeds an easy chore, bordering on the pleasant – as far as chores go.  Rain stopped play halfway through and so the weeds have only been removed from half of the pea bed.

When the sun came back out again I took the time to look over my garden again and noticed it was beginning to look dramatically different.  With the removal of the lofty asparagus fronds and the old manky pea trellis, the height of the garden seems to be significantly reduced.  But at the same time it looked cleaner and fresher.  So I decided to work with it and took down the old cucumber trellis that was still holding the dried luffas – which gives me another rainy day project.

The intervals between the sun soon became too short to work with and eventually became non-existent, so I stopped gardening.

Come again soon – I really feel like I am getting somewhere instead of wishing I was getting somewhere.

Sarah the Gardener  : o )