Blank canvas

I’m filthy, smelly and tired. So a good day then. Today was vetch day.   There is an enormous bank above our lawn. I measured it out and it’s sixty feet long and at least fifteeen feet wide. And steeply sloping.

Every spring we get the most fantastic display of blue flowering vetch.   It puts on a great display and then dies.   And boy does it die.

If I were an organised gardener, I would have had this dead matter out in July. At the latest. But now it’s August and I had a huge task ahead of me.

For not only were there huge long tendrils of dead plant matter, but I had brambles, some flowering nettles (argh) and flowering clematis.

I opted for the confidence boosting task of getting the vetch out first. That only took a few hours.   And then donned some serious gauntlets to yank out the rest of the beasties.   The clematis is always in the wrong place and its flowers are so insignificant, I can’t really put it to good use.

There are stones in here, some boulders and some landscaping opportunities.   But not today. It was a matter of clearing out all the plants and having a think.

Luckily there are some goodies underneath.   There are the flowering thymes which I hurriedly transplanted last year.   And best of all, the eragrostis.

This grass is proving so troublesomely large in the calabert garden, so perhaps I can park it here in spring.

And look bare earth. That means I can sow my wildflower meadow mix in spring.   It’s the wonderful Pictorial Meadow mix and was a very luxurious birthday present.  

So if I can weed this one more time in winter (oh yes, it will all come back) then there is hope for something more attractive this time next year.

But there was one more thing to do. And it was soul destroying. I have a mountain of dead plant matter to move.

It’s way too much for any of my compost bins, so it has to be wheeled (teetering) all the way up to the eastern edge of the property.   I did four loads and gave up.

It is first up on my list for tomorrow.