Scorched earth

This is to be the routine: each morning before 930am I can get an hour of strimming done somewhere on the farm.   This morning was the area around the olive trees, the front of the house, the edges of the drive.

With this endlessly sunny and dry weather, everything looks utterly parched.   But at least it’s tidy.   I have to accept that the third of my new olive trees didn’t survive the winter. It is well and truly dead.   So out it comes, and I need to order another this September.   If I can manage it, I really want to get new plants into the ground before October rather than January this year.   They need to get their roots down for a bit more first.

I was planning on taking the strimmer over to the duck pond area but ran out of petrol before I could.   I have promised my back not to do more than one tank per day. So it went onto the list for the morrow.   But as I walked back across the lawn I noticed something odd. Surely there were more miscanthus plants there a few days before.

And then the horrid truth dawned.   I have inadvertantly mown one completely off.   The far left one is the new plant I had only put in a few months earlier.   And in my enthusiastic mowing I have scalped it.   Will it return? I have no idea.   But I must mark it up for next time.   A large sign saying ‘don’t mow!’ might help.

Chastened I slunk back to the potting shed and spent a happy and head down half hour potting up tomato plants. I couldn’t do any harm with tomatoes.   They are bomb proof.