Fluffy, very fluffy

From a distance our lower terraces (a few acres in size) are green and lush and lovely.

Up close they are fluffy with lurking brambles, pernicious weeds, nascent bracken and all manner of nasties.

It has been on my To Do list for weeks – strim the bracken.  Someone wrote (and I fear I can’t remember where) that if you can cut the heads off the invasive bracken just when they are pushing out the ground; and again when they try to grow one more time, you will kill them.

And I find they are spreading too merrily on the large meadow right down on the lower part of the farm.

It’s not a place I go to very often. But I have learned that if you leave any of this land for just one season, you lose the fight against the enemy.

And for me the enemy is mainly bracken and brambles.  So I twinkled down there with my hefty mower and empty sacks for the grass cuttings and off I went.

Oh boy.

Anyone looking down the mountain and seeing my heaving up and down the slope would probably shake their head and mutter; that woman has bit off a bit more than she can chew.

Mole hills, thick tussocks, sudden lurching slopes. It’s all fun and games. And I realised that I will have to climb into the harness and get the strimmer out after all.  Especially for the bracken.

Luckily three of the terraces are moderately flat and were a joy to mow. Nothing beats taking down brambles when they are only a few inches high and just poised to get away.

But I have so much more to do. And when I walked up onto the first and second terrace that I had strimmed just a week ago, they were already putting on absurd growth. How is that possible? We have only had 10mm of rain in an entire month. I suspect underground springs are at work. Devilish things.

So enough of this indoors and relaxing stuff, back out I go.