Lovely lawns

How amazing is this? The end of a hot summer and the lawn is absurdly lush.   That’s what a weekly downpour will do.

I have given myself a treat. Lawn mowing. I haven’t done it for ages.   But I couldn’t launch in first thing: there was a slight dew on the grass.   So I spend a happy (lies) half hour picking up all the horse manure on the lower terraces first.

It’s a grim business but my goodness it’s lovely stuff. The manure collected over the course of the year from our stallion lawn mowers has yielded some black gold.

I took a wheel barrow load up to the hedge at the top of the property, and gave each little shrub a good dose.   Artur deigned to wake up and pester me for about ten minutes. But the lure of the new box in the potting shed was greater than human company.

Still he would have hated the rest of my work today: noisy lawn mowing.

I’m desperate for the grass clippings to mulch over the parts of the potager that is more bare earth than crops.   Digging up rows of potatoes has meant I have large spaces that need covering up.   I usually just dump the grass cuttings on the soil.   But I decided to put down newspaper first for once.   Down went some precious Guardian newsprint – a process which took ages as I had to read bits first – and then the grass.

There isn’t rain predicted for a week or so, but hopefully the weeds won’t push through before then.   And it’s so fun to put down vivid green grass to hide the soil.

I had plenty left over to mulch some of the trees in the orchard, and then I had a brain wave.   The small bank above the road and below the house is a lush mess of weeds.   There are four olive trees in there somewhere. But it is crying out for a bit of a re- design.   It’s hard to strim as it’s so steep.   But it is also the first bank you see as you drive up the road and approach the house.   And garden.

I thought that ground cover plants would be the solution and researched like mad to come up with something attractive.   Achilleas are the weeds of choice here.   But to get the ones I really like – achilliea terracotta or rose madder – would be a huge investment.

And the problem is that it’s hard to get ground cover plants established while there is such a fast growth of grasses and weeds. And plum saplings.   So I had an idea that I could keep on applying a mulch of grass cuttings to slow things down a bit.   And then give it the eragrostis treatment.   Pull up all the weeds and growth, dig out the plum saplings, put down a mulch and then plant little eragrostis grasses through it.   Simple.

I just need about two days free, a huge heap of mulch, and about 60 eragrostis plants.   The grasses I have, but not the two days and the mulch. Yet.   So I guess I will have to put it on the list for October.

See what you get up to when you mow and plod your way for hours alone behind a lawn mower. Your mind drifts.

Anyway, I have done the orchard, the track, the road down towards the letterbox, and in a bit I shall zip up to the top of the road and mow down the walnut path.   And then haul my lovely machine over the beach of gravel (always playful) and put it away.

The quince trees are full of fruit right now. I never even noticed – but Jean Daniel has assured me he is closely monitoring their ripening each time he passes.   He is the mountain top’s quince paste king. I look forward to getting my share.