Favourite bouquet

These are by far and away my favourite garden bouquets. Chestnut sticks.

It’s Sunday so I choose not to make a huge noise all over the valley with my strimming. So I started with much more genteel persuits: watering.

The potager is well drenched and I have planted up the twenty extra dwarf French bean plants I germinated in root trainers in the potting shed. They came up in just a week.

And I have done my fortnightly watering of all the fruit trees and hedge plants.  A snaking hose and a following cat.

Another thing I wanted to do was locate my favourite gauntlet gloves. I own just one pair that can withstand brambles amd I looked for them everywhere.

But something told me that I had left them down on the lower terraces yesterday.  So I decided to go down and cut some more sticks.

You can see by the scale of the secateurs just how large these bouquets are.  I’m very pleased.

And the destination? The shade garden. For the past few weeks I have been pondering planting up a long hedge up there.  But realised that if I get it wrong (and I get most design ideas wrong in the tricky shade garden) it will be a year before I can pull it all out.

I don’t even know if shrubs will survive in such dry shade.

So I have decided to make a temporary pallisade and see how that looks. It will only take about a day or so to build and costs nowt.  And if I like what I see I might leave it in place. Or decide that an evergreen shrub is what I ought to plant.

Fun and games.  But tomorrow, being Monday, I’ll be strimming very early first thing.