Phoenix from the ashes and all that

Look upon the vineyard and be amazed.

Fence posts all fixed. Wires in place. And now a second strim of weeds in one month.

You could almost call me a winegrower.  All I need now is a crop.

But I’m handing that over to Malcom from the next village. Hopefully he will take good care of the vines.  I feel I’ve done my stint.

But naturally taking the strimmer all the way down the mountain meant I had to give it a good run. 

And the bracken is back. Just ten days after I cut the heads off all the blighters they are up again.

So if all goes well and now that I have reduced their growth to the ground, they won’t be up again this year.  I think I heard that as a theory.

We shall see.

I strimmed two terraces worth of bracken and caught the brambles just as they were re-emerging. When will it ever end? I think that is the gardener’s lament.

My aim is to have terraces that are just wildflowers and no nasties.

This one is just stunning. But only from a distance. Up close there are hidden brambles starting into growth.  So I will have to cut it back one more time. And then I can ignore it all summer.

But it does look gorgeous from afar.

I was tempted to keep on strimming, but luckily my back said ‘enough’ and I was gasping for a cup of tea.  So up I plodded.

And then spent the afternoon working closer to home. Planting out time.

I have flowers and fennel and chard and salad crops to get into the vegetable garden.

Here it’s cosmos, calendula neon, tall calendula (seeds from Andrew), dahlias and nicotiana.

No, wait, if I look carefully this bed is dwarf french beans, fennel and salad. Sorry about that.  I’m in a planting out frenzy.

Tomorrow it’s market day so flowers in bouquets galore. And I need to buy more potting compost – the plants are voracious in their growth right now and I have to madly keep on potting them on.