These last weeks, a great deal of time and effort has gone into cutting back leggy summer growth. We almost do a full prune of the garden through Jan/Feb, which is pretty dramatic stuff – not for the faint-hearted; and I’m grateful to have Alex help do the vast majority of hard yakka this year.
Mid-week, I took a day to begin phase one of our seasonal crop-rotation with him, before taking to the companion plants under the espaliered fruit trees: I get to a point with plants where a job needs doing, and it needs doing right now! I casually mentioned to Alex I’d spend half an hour or so making a very big mess (i.e., when I finished would he mind pleeeeeeeease picking it up for me – it would make the job so much quicker!). So I got stuck in with the secateurs and it was a very satisfactory session indeed! The trees were freed of overgrowth, the plants rid of excess foliage that was attracting fungal disease in this most humid of months, and the whole area gave a huge sigh of freshly cleared relief.
There was just one thing – I couldn’t bring myself to throw out all the material I’d cut back: that wormwood and tansy yielded such an intense aroma, it was almost overwhelming (and it looked so pretty!). So I rescued a bundle and took a break to tie up half a dozen bunches with string, then hung them up around the Kitchen Garden. Will my romantic posies ward off pests? Probably not…but they certainly lend a deeply aromatic scent to the air. I think it’s a quirky notion, while Alex reckons I’m mad. (Anyway, I needed to sit down for 10 minutes after what was, in fact, about a 2 hour sweaty stint bent in half!), and he’s probably right – I’m sure I’m completely cuckoo!