Sneeze and strim

Hilarious. What better activity to do as a multi tasker?  Sneeze, strim, sneeze again. Time for more drugs.

So where was I? I’ve put all the plants that lived in pots for the month back into the potting shed.   It seemed appropriate. We can’t have an empty potting shed. Artur likes a few obstacles to stalk over before he settles down.   Heaps of growth on the tomatoes and the eragrostis.   And the verbena bonariensises have behaved beautifully.   I’m going to get them into the strawberry bed as quickly as possible.   I’ve put in 36 already (that was last night) but the whole area can absorb another fifty more.

I have held off eating the strawberries that are there; saving them for the weekend.   But I did pop up to the raspberries and picked another large bowlful.   Most I took to Jean Daniel and left in his kitchen with a note, but the rest are in the fridge.

And then to stay in the shade a bit longer (it’s 28C here today) I planted out more of Leslie’s lovely weeds. She left me a bucket of her invasive asters. So they went in with the rest of the colony opposite the shade garden. Sorry the photo is so stark and entirely without context. I was probably sneezing at the time.

The rest of this very long day saw me lurching from chore to chore without any real list. Which meant that when I saw something that urgently needed doing, I attacked it.   First up were the euphorbias.   I can’t remember them looking this sorry after flowering.   So I took out half the flower heads, and will contemplate the rest.   They do a great job of screening the compost bins, so I don’t want to lose too much height.   When I find it too much of an eyesore, I’ll chop more.

It’s the same for the vines in the courtyard; they are in the way.   I have to tame the ones that are at eye level and wish that the growth was more over the table and doing a job of creating shade.   The lower level ones just screen the view. Not what one wants.

I did a fair bit of ambling in and photographing the builder taking out our old fireplace, and then decided to get all the verbena bonariensis plants into the strawberry bed.   A bit warm doing it mid afternoon, and with any other plant I would be concerned for their health, but these are the brutes of the seedling kingdom. Nothing seems to faze them.  

Naturally I watered them lavishly, and then decided that the eyesore of the hoses all over the place (plus the fact that very hot water came out and almost put my boast of the tough seedling to a real test) had to end.   It’s amazing how the hoses can heat up in the sun.

I coiled and tidied and went to fetch the sage.

There were 27 plants that needed to go into the little bed I’ve half created on the north side of the calabert.  Â  But first I needed to clear the area.   This is where there were a lot of primroses in early spring, so I held off until they had flowered and deteriorated.

The best bit of course was that this small part of the monstrous garden is actually in deep shade in the afternoon.   A very rare thing around here, so I positively revelled in the almost cool shade.  

I did duck down to the compost bins with a wheelbarrow and spade to collect a bit of mulch; this soil is rather impoverished.   So that went on, and then it was down to the placement of the sage and the planting out.

Lovely.   The whole row is now complete. And all done with about fifty five plants created from cuttings I took in February.   That’s the most pleasing part: free plants. Hurrah.