Lawns, Landscape and Learning (13-19 Apr.)

The weather this week:

Temperatures from 0-35 in the polytunnel this week

‘Cast ne’er a clout til May is oot’, goes the old Scots saying. I always thought it meant ‘don’t take any of your warm under-clothes off until the end of May’, but some say it actually refers to blackthorn (otherwise known as ‘May’) being in bloom. Well, our blackthorn is in bloom right now, but the weather is still as capricious as ever.

We’ve had 2 frosts this week, one took the tunnel temperature down to 0 degrees and ‘burnt’ a couple of the tomato plants that were too near the polythene. I sympathize with their frazzled leaves, having been both sunburned and blasted with icy, easterly wind. (It’s almost fortunate that we’re in lockdown as I am certainly not fit to be seen in public.) I even spotted snow on the hills to the west over near Peebles.

For the most part, the mornings have been balmy and hopeful, and we’ve had lovely sunny evenings. But it’s still very dry (we’ve had no rain for two weeks) and during the day a mean wind is drying things out and making it quite unpleasant to be outdoors.

In the polytunnel

Plants in trays are beginning to suffer for the need to be transplanted but given the frosts it’s probably not yet safe to put them out. Yet another reason not to start seeds too early!!

Oriental salad is almost at harvesting stage and so are radishes.

The controversy of lawns

The biggest change to the garden this week came from my mowing my lawns for the first time. Boy, what a difference that makes…

I’m in two minds about lawns. They are, for the most part, resource-hungry monocultures that require a lot of maintenance. They’re often talked about in very derogatory tones by the organic/permaculture set who see them as a missed opportunity for greater biodiversity and varied habitat, and a waste of fuel/energy when cut. But mowing the lawn this week may have changed my mind about the future of our grassy spaces. Not only did it look rather lovely when I’d finished, but the smell of petrol and cut grass took me right back to childhood summers making it very nostalgic. It was also pretty great to have a place to roll around with Humphrey and play Boules in the evening sun. (We’ve had to develop house rules as Humph keeps eating the couchon (or ‘jack’). We use a stake in the ground instead which he tires of attacking after a short while.)

Scything

Humph and the scythe (when the latter was in operation, the former was indoors).

Inspired by my grass-cutting adventures, I also decided it was time to revive my scything abilities out in our rather wild paddock. I learned how to scythe last summer from Will Sutherland who runs self-sufficiency courses over near Alnwick. He made it look incredibly easy, and expounded the virtues of scything for wild flowers, and also as a way of creating good ‘green’ material for the compost. After a sweaty hour or so of swiping and slashing at the grass, I took a break and read that I should have waited until May or June to allow any wildflowers to bloom and set seed. Ah well. My limited ability meant I only managed to cut a small corner of the orchard-to-be, anyway, so I doubt it’ll make much difference.

Making space in the garden

Our newly neat lawns seemed to chide me into tidying beds and edges (a never ending task). I also planted up a rather neglected raised bed over in a shady area of the garden. It’s not a great bed and is currently full of discarded soil and sprouting ground elder, but I used a few spare seeds and we’ll see what happens.

As the seed trays and nursery beds in the polytunnel are beginning to overflow with enthusiastic seedlings, I realise that I don’t actually have much outdoor planting space. Humph isn’t helping matters by playing on the few beds I have and has even taken to using one particular bed as a loo (despite our remonstrations). That bed has now been written off, limiting my space even further. He is also beginning to be interested in digging and chased his first mouse down a hole in the garden. As much as I encourage rodent hunting, I can see that his digging habits may make us fall out, so a fence around the veg garden will have to be high on the list for next week.

Mulch success!!

After the failed leaf mulch, I tried mulching my strawberry bed with straw from the fruit tree packaging and amazingly, it didn’t get blown away in the first breeze. The strawbs seem to already be responding positively and are showing new leafy growth. Unfortunately, Humph also approves of the straw and has been merrily dragging bits of it across the lawn to make a nest somewhere. Another reason to install a temporary Humph-fence.

Morning walks

We have been trying to take Humph on a little walk before breakfast to get him into the habit. He cannot walk far at all right now, and won’t be able to do more than 20 minutes until he’s about 9 months old, so we just walk him round the paddock and then into the poly tunnel for a play. Even this is a challenge on the days when there is dew, frost, or too much wind, and he protests by anchoring himself at the front door and whining pitifully. I think I may develop my scything skills by carving a meandering path through the paddock. This will hopefully make things more comfortable for those who are vertically challenged and will also encourage us to get to spend some time out there. I feel there are probably some interesting flowers and grasses out there which we should get to know.

The sky at night

We’ve had incredible stars on several nights this week and I wondered if in this time of lockdown there is even less light pollution than normal? We can see a glow over towards Newcastle which is about 50 miles away, but our neighbouring towns barely seem to have any effect on the darkness. One night we stood out looking at at the stars until our necks hurt. We will have to get deckchairs, duvets and whisky to do a proper vigil some night.

Re-reading the landscape

I rarely seem to get beyond the garden these days but managed a couple of walks over the hill in a vain attempt to get some exercise. We’ve been hearing curlews and twites trilling and warbling alongside the blackbird, robin and sparrows, and up on the hill the flocks of twites are wonderful to watch and their scrilling sound, like a cassette being wound backwards at high speed, is pretty amusing. I also found a wood anemones covering a large part of a sloped field, indicating that these fields and moorland weren’t always as bleak and exposed as they seem now. A little while ago I started reading a book on how to read the landscape in which Patrick Whitefield indicates how varied our use of the land has been over the years. We tend to think of the countryside landscape of fields, hedges, walls and livestock as ‘ancient’ - an unchanging fact. But like wood anenomes on an open hillside, and the fossilized remains of tree trunks on our moor, there are hints of other times when the land was used, valued and seen quite differently.

Keeping fed and watered

On the way out the gate for a walk one morning I bumped into our farmer-neighbour who was out checking his sheep. Humph – completely neglecting his duty to social distance – rushed over to the farmer and gave his boots an enthusiastic investigation. Luckily for Humph, he hasn’t yet developed very good powers of perception and so totally missed the large and rather mean looking sheepdog in her crate on the back of the farmer’s quad.

We chatted at the requisite 2 meters about the changes in the world, sheep prices (apparently they have fallen by £30/head) and the impending dearth of pickers and farm workers for harvest time. There are ads in the local paper for short term employment fruit picking, - wouldn’t it be good for more of us to have a hand in and knowledge of local food production? - but I also just heard that we are shipping in hundreds of Romanian workers. Our neighbour felt positive that current challenges would only encourage the public to support local farms and food supply chains, but I fear this is more likely to be determined by the loyalty of the big 7 supermarkets to supporting domestic ag. Aldi and Lidl have just been exposed for stocking Polish beef – a real kick in the teeth for Scottish beef farmers.

We also discussed the works needing done to our water tank up on his land. We rely on an entirely private water supply which comes down off the hill to our house alone. This is wonderful from a self-sufficiency perspective, but we are also solely responsible for its maintenance. Over the winter we noticed a steady stream of water exiting the tank next to the overflow pipe and employed a local man to come and assess the tank for re-plastering. It is more worrying now that the leak has ceased, meaning the water level is low. We haven’t had proper rain for a couple of weeks, so perhaps it is not surprising. It makes me even more eager to design a water management system for our property.

I did spend quite a bit of time this week working on my first permaculture design – a learning pathway – which felt less like a design and more like a mental clear-out, preparing the way for me to actually start doing some work. I’m still feeling pretty paralysed in the midst of all this free time. I think a lot of folk feel the same.

The first thing to design would be a work space and routine which keeps me focused.