Canneberge factory

Here’s one I wrote earlier. These are my scattered notes from the 2nd January. Twas a day up at the top potager and one where I noticed that this mountain is really seeping from the rain. Even in the vegetable bed I find rivulets of water. Not as dramatic as the Doulet river below the house, but it felt like it after I had been kneeling in the soil for an hour and wondered why the words hypothermia were forming on my cold lips.

This slope on the top of the vegetable bed is wasted ground. It is rocky, weedy and does nothing to help with the production of food crops or flowers. So I am afraid I am hiding by planting lots of cranberry plants. Canneberge to the keen. I managed to split the big potsI brought over from Blackmoor nurseries into six plants. So they are all in a row up the bank. With miracles and luck that whole bank will be covered in cranberries in a few years time.  If they keep well watered. The two at the far left end were the ones that are sited near the underground water spring, so they may do well.  But then again, if it gets hot and dry like last year they will have to rely on the charity of she who wields the watering can.

Trying to put down more fabric is quite a jigsaw. It’s unsightly but I just know I don’t have the fight for another season of such heavy duty weeding. It may be that this is the last picture of the top vegetable bed you will see for a bit. Too ugly for words with all that black fabric.

In fact I’m not sure just how much will go up there. One row of potatoes, and two of garlic. But the lower vegetable bed really is large enough for us. And there are the asparagus to wait for. And now the soft fruit.

And when digging up near the cranberries I have managed to save the heeled in cuttings of fruit bushes from last year. I may just make it a more soft fruit garden up there.

Or when I’m really grown up, get a polytunnel.

And by a miracle of tardy blogging here is the seamless link to last week when I worked up at the top plot again. This time it was to attack all the brambles that grow so lustily along the fence. Feisty critters, and really hard to shift when the growing season is upon them. Up with the fork which already has an Ardeche bend to it (that’s the granite stones it encounters on an almost daily dig). Plunge, lift, twist. And then once I had done the whole length, down to the yanking and swearing and removing. Thank goodness for thick gloves.

I had to swing out and hold on for dear life yanking the brambles from the outside. But it did mean that I visited one part of the huge garden for the first time. And naturally my thoughts have turned to improvements. One day I can see a whole thicket of miscanthus grass here – swaying in the breeze and hopefully smothering the weeds. I have the seeds, and the ambition. Let’s hope they will germinate in the spring.