Aural incongruity

Ugh. I just stood up to make a cup of tea after lunch and realised that I ache.  I’ve had a full on morning of exertion and it feels as though my limbs protest. But I made it to the kettle and have flopped back down on the sofa. I’ll try not to groan when the water has boiled and I make tea.

But what exertion. I raced out all bright eyed and bushy tailed early and was strimming just before 8am.  My new strimmer blades scything through the very tall grass on the first steep bank below the road.

It’s hard to take pictures as there is always a bit of shade making a mockery of my photographic skills. And even worse, the After Shots look as bad as the Befores.

It takes at least two passes of the strimmer blade just to get the volume of dry grass and bramble matter down.  And then I need to rake. And I might even try and get the mower onto some of the flatter bits.  So it won’t be until the end of the week before I can really say that I’ve tamed a huge part of the garden.

So you’ll have to put up with ‘squint and try and work out what I’ve done’ pictures for now.

The hard part is it’s just too hot to work later than 11am.

Actually I was chortling earlier (heat stroke, probably) thinking how incongruous it was to be listening to a good dramatisation of Sense and Sensability in my ears as I strimmed and cut.  For true Austen authenticity, I ought to have been using a scythe.

Luckily I then changed over to some stored podcasts of Margaret Roach’s Way to Garden.  Much more appropriate.  And she was interviewing a gardener who has jsut written a book called The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattenites Became Gentlemen Farmers.  I love the title. And will order the book on Abebooks to find out all about it.

If I were smart I’d have chosen some quiet corner of shade to do something useful.  I thought I’d found a good spot in the steep bank above the lawn.  There was some shade when I started…

But boy did it get hot. But I was so determined to pull off the dead annual grasses. And cut out the incipient brambles, and the wild clematis, and the nettle patch that wants to get established.

What I had hoped was to unearth the eragrosist curvula grasses which I transplanted last year,

Imagine the scenario.  No decent rain since May, blazing sunshine for weeks on end, a steep slope that is so well drained on poor soil you wouldn’t wish a weed in this hostile environment.  And a thick covering of weeds.

To my utter delight, there are the grasses alive and thriving under all this mess.  The electric green such a contrast to the beige.

It’s not a thicket. But it’s a start.

I have pulled off so much dead grass that I have to get a tarpaulin out onto the lawn and pile all the dead matter on top. It’s light and not much use on a good compost heap.

And there are too many annoying bits of bramble and nettle roots to make me think twice about putting it anywhere other than the compost heap at the far end of the duck pond area.

But it’s in full sun and I was dripping from exertion.  So have wisely decided to leave the chore until it cools down.  Later tonight perhaps, or tomorrow morning. No wait, early morning is when I strim, not haul away dead thatch.  I need to clone myself. Or just get a whole lot less sleep.

Sleep feels like a tempting post luncheon idea right now.  But I shall resist and go and build a fence instead.