A little winter landscaping

Ah, there you are.

Yes, Happy belated New Year to you all. I’ve come inside to warm up, feed the fire, feed the cat, and feed the feed.

I do apologise for the long gap in garden adventures. I have been travelling like mad.

Paris, London, Edinburgh, Argyll, Margate. Quite the cornucopia of locations.

If I can dig out any garden worthy shots, I promise to do an ‘En Vacances’ blog.

But for now let’s play in the dirt.

I have started this landscaping project way way back in Spring. And I bet when you saw me launch myself at this strange hidden part of the lower terraces you doubted my ability to follow through.

And believe me, I doubted I would too.

After all this is a part of the farm one just doesn’t go.

You can’t see if from the house. You can’t even see it from the first terrace where I mow like mad and pretend I have a very long lawn.

But the darling wild boar did their annual churn of the grass in search of grubs.

And I was forced to go down there to affect repairs.

This mainly involves trying to jigsaw the divots of grass back into the huge holes they dig.

It’s a peaceful process; albeit a long one. And I had to do it two days in a row. And with the gaps I couldn’t fill I needed soil.

And what do I spy lower down the terraces? Mole hill mounds of lovely dirt.

And the buckets? Why lying where I left them MONTHS BEFORE below the giant mulberry.

It’s an utter disgrace that I neglected this project for so long.

Romain strimmed not once, but twice over the course of the year. And he very kindly did not point out the buried buckets.

Bless.

In the fog this past week I would have been forgiven for spotting anything below the mighty tree.

But once I climbed down it was obvious I needed to perform the mole hill soil task on terrace one. And then spend a bit of quality time on terrace three.

This is the challenge. Mountains erode. And over time soil will travel lower and lower down the slope. Slowed somewhat by five hundred year old stone walls. But travel they will.

And I realised that I had no hope of controlling the rampant bramble and Vinca (periwinkle) invasion here if I didn’t shift all that soil immediately under the wall.

So dig I did.

A trowel, a fork, a bucket, two pairs of filthy work trousers. Two days.

I have only done a six metre section of the wall immediately below the mulberry.

If I were mad I’d keep going and spend the entire month of January digging this whole long terrace out. It is about fifty metres long.

And there are more and more terraces that are crying out for this care.

But I have ornamental grasses to cut back. And I need to get any area I landscape resown with grass before the ants emerge.

There’s nothing more dispiriting than watching your carefully sown with grass seed area being carted off by a colony of ants. One grass seed at a time. It is such a race against their industry that I tend to put heaps of grass seeds right at the entrance to their many colonies to save them the work. And give me at least a day or two to get the seeds to germinate before they grab the lot.

That’s always the fun of this bare dirt stuff.

You need to cover it fast. And if the grass seed gets nicked, then the damn brambles and Vinca and seed blown weeds will colonise and I’ll have to start again.

Actually in my next life I am getting a mini digger on day one of this farm life and landscaping this whole area would take a month rather than 18 years.

Except the slopes are so steep I would have been fetched off mid dig and this whole saga would not be here for me to record…

That’s a salutary New Years musing.

But it is meditative work and most satisfying. Even in the freezing wind.

After a day of the pesky digging out the weeds and lobbing rocks, I was ready to rake.

I have put aside a lot of this excellent soil in buckets. And the rest I laboriously shifted away from the wall and down the slope to make mowing less an assault course and more of a gentle push.

I’ll have to move fast on that grass seed now, even if they won’t germinate for ages. After this cold snap we have an odd dry and almost warm spell coming. So I could have a win.

A lot of the rocks were just too heavy for me to put back on the wall. And I fear the wild boar will just charge off down the mountain when spooked and bring more crashing down.

I know that my neighbour Agnès has a clever way to keep boar off her walls up at the next mountain col.

I could try that. She places chestnut logs onto the tops of the perfectly made walls.

But mine are in a precarious spot of being close to the amazing mulberry where all the animals feed in summer.

One spooked boar who charges off in fear down the mountain won’t be mindful of any of landscaping deterrents.

But right now I have left it as a sort of wild boar playground until I find a way to fence it off.

And those seventeen buckets of soil….

Well yes. They have to come up the mountain somehow.

Tooth fairy? Elf?