A light strim

I had planned to spend the week strimming and on my last day of this trip I finally got round to it.   Greed was a factor here. I couldn’t reach the ripe figs because the old waist high wildflower meadow was in the way.   So that was the east garden sorted.

Then with mighty strimmer attached, I prowled the rest of the garden cutting a swathe and reducing the growth to stubble. Lovely.

I have two enemies on this farm: verbascums and Spanish broom.   They self seed too, too prolifically and cannot be cut down with an ordinary sweep with the strimmer once they get established.   (And I’m allergic to the verbascums.) So you have to pause in your rhythmical work and get out the secateurs and cut away.

This is the reason for about an hour and a half’s silence in the early evening up at the top terrace.   I started with the strimmer but had to down tools to cut out a particularly stubborn broom bush. And then looked around and realised to my horror that this entire terrace was in danger of being swamped by the plant.   Off I went and I methodically worked my way along and up.   How many did I cut? Hundreds. And was so high and the light was fading so fast that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a wild boar or a deer amble out of the forest to have a look and see who was groaning and hissing on their patch of the farm.

I’m going to monitor them carefully in the spring to see if they surge back to growth and send forth their (frankly ugly) yellow flowers and start the process all over again.