The new shape of the garden started to become a reality for me this afternoon. It wasn’t really in the plan for this afternoon; we were going to hoe through all our root crops, what with it being a root day, and cart some muck up to Sunny Acres ready for the pumpkins, what with them being overdue for planting. But hoeing the barely-germinated carrots and beetroots isn’t a job that most people can manage, and somehow in an inspired and possibly foolish move, we all spent the afternoon mulching the barely established hedge instead.
This hedge is part of the grand vision Henning created for a smaller, enclosed garden with a thick hedge laid out along according to the golden mean in a gently swooping spiral from the barn extension down to the watermeadows. Early in the spring we enthusiastically started digging out an old hedge by hand one afternoon and, with the help of the front loader, managed to replant a bit of it along the line of the new hedge. Since that afternoon of enthusiasm the whole hedge project has been more or less put on hold in favour of more pressing and more achievable tasks. The plants, though, have mostly, miraculously, survived despite the lack of rain and almost complete neglect.
Then a couple of weeks ago, when it was silage making day, Sebastian mowed the long grass at the far end of the garden and around the headlands of Sunny Acres with the tractor. But then left the cut grass lying on the field because it wasn’t worth sending round the baler for such small fiddly amounts. And just yesterday Ruben mowed the area beyond the soft fruit ready for his chickens. So we currently have a huge quantity of grass clippings and nearly-hay at our disposal. Some of it is destined for incorporation in to a smart new compost heap soon. And today a large quantity of it became hedge mulching material. The whole Thursday afternoon garden team (except Debbie who was looking after the dried elderflowers) set to with rakes and wheelbarrows, and I recovered the smaller saplings that had disappeared in to the long grass and weeds. By the end of the afternoon the whole first quarter of the hedge was roughly mulched, so now I can begin to imagine what this new garden could look like.
PS Apologies for the lack of blogging activity. It reflects not a scarcity of garden activity, but rather a surplus. I am just uploading lots of pictures of silage making and polytunnels and pigs in the garden and such like, so do have a look…
