Water, water

I’m up early to give the garden a good drench.   Lower vegetable garden, and then hauling the hose right up to the young verbena bonariensis forest of seedlings on the bank above the potting shed.

Tomorrow I will do the orchard and the cabbages and raspberries right up at the top of the property. It’s a great work out on the arms as we only have one hose.   And it stretches about 200 metres.

It is a hot week of blazing sunshine this week, so I have to get everything done early.   Mulching was up next: there’s plenty of lovely compost in the bins.   So I have decided to mulch like mad and empty one side completely so I can fill up and start again. A lovely cycle. But best not done in the heat of the day.

I have decided that the little nascent verbena bonariensis hedge (read two inches high in most areas) needs a feed.   So I have napped each tiny plant in a rich compost to make a pretty row of dark soil.   And hope that it will feed the plants over this hot week and beyond.   If all goes well they will just get to the right height in time for autumn and then they will die back down again.   But one must persist as there are a few plants that survived the winter and they are utterly divine.

I don’t have enough mulch to cover the entire vegetable gardens, so I have decided to target specific plants.   There are plenty of squash plants dotted throughout the onions and garlic bed.   I can’t take a picture of it as you can’t see the plants for the weeds.   But each small plant now has a dinner plate sized circle of lovely mulch.   And tomorrow I need to do the olive trees and maybe the fruit trees in the orchard. There’s fruit down there and it’s all very exciting after just one year of waiting.

Walking down to the stables I noticed that in just a week the orchard needs mowing – wildflowers are fantastic at very zippy colonising and are trying to get established in the lawn. I’m not ready to do any clever designs of wildflower squares just yet.   So instead I did the dull old mow of every bit.   And the track up to the pool, and the piano area of lush grass under the birch tree.   And the edges of the road down to the end of the property.   And the parking area up the top.   That’s the problem with mowing; it’s a tad addictive.

Hours later I was ready to flop into the pool. But instead I decided to pick white currants and raspberries.   The black currants are also ripe but not juicy. So I have hauled in about a kilo or so of white currants with the intention of turning them into jam.   The jostaberries – our star soft fruit – is a week off fully ripe.

I have done the ‘turn kilos of fruit into jelly’ palaver. And found that all the effort yields so few pots after all that toil.   So I mixed white currants (simmered  for twenty minutes and pushed through a sieve) with lovely raspberries.   And I must say the effect is rather stunning and I managed eleven pots.   Not as rich as just plain old raspberry, but delicious.   My best jam yet? Perhaps. (I’m tucking into a crumpet and jam as I type.)

And other things? Can’t recall at all what I did. Picked cherries, tried to take pictures of all the lovely New Dawn roses in the herb garden, and generally pottered about.

Time to potter into a glass of beer if you ask me. And watch the tennis.