The magnolias are *too* abundant

Some days it can be a struggle to get out of bed when it feels like a grind. But this week has given me a big eye roll- how bad is life really, we faff around a garden, people constantly offer us nice drinks and the weather has been beautiful.

Here is the latest champagne problem: the magnolias are *too* abundant, too beautiful, too floral, and they keep dropping their enormous petals, so we have to pick them up. Cue mocking baby cry face… our gardens are too pretty at the moment.

Please excuse the washing line chopping up the middle of the shot.

What I'm obsessing over this week

Hydrangeas. Check this out.

On the left, we have a hydrangea cut low, a la “the Zoe cut” that I always used to do. On the right, we have a hydrangea cut high, the “Gill cut” that was so successful the last few years. This cut is basically deadheading, tidying/removing the dead, but not reducing it much. They were pruned on the same day, at the same time.

We prune in Winter and late Autumn because the energy in the plant is leaving the tips of the plant and going into the base. This means we are removing less energy from the plant- if all of the energy in the plant is in growth tips (like in Spring), removing those growth tips removes far more of its energy stores and the plant will struggle to regrow.

Now that it is Spring and all of the energy is going back into the growth tips (top of the plant), the leaves and buds are all starting to grow. Both hydrangeas have the same amount of energy stores (give or take), but the left hand one has far less places to put its energy, whereas the right hand one has more buds to spread its energy around. So, fewer buds = bigger buds, more buds = smaller buds.

This has made me thing a lot about the people who prune their roses right down to almost nothing every Winter, and still have enormous, happy roses in Summer…

It is also a good reminder to cut the heck out of anything you don’t like, now, and to leave the rest until as close to the start of Summer as possible- because whatever you cut now has all of its precious energy stores right up at the parts of the plant you want to chop off…

What staff learnt about this week

Our weekly focus was bulbs! Bulbs, bulbs, bulbs. I was hoping to help us ID desirable Spring bulbs, but we talked a lot about undesirable bulbs instead, sigh.

Highlights: Mish accidentally weedeating a lightbulb buried in a lawn, during Bulbs week. It’s not H&S week!

Lowlights: I was very motivated to help Catherine learn how to weed montbretia and oxalis bulbs this week, but the properties I chose had (for various reasons) raised soil levels, so the bulbs were like 20cm down in the dirt, and not right near the top. So instead of a motivating “well done!” she got a “DIG DEEPER!!”

A recipe for the foragers

Another champagne problem- onion weed. This is the time of year I stock up on Onion Weed in the kitchen, I made huge jars of it to last me through the Winter. If you have this dude in your garden, be happy, not furious! I have never removed onion weed from my own gardens, because I use it instead of onions or chives all the time, so it doesn’t survive very long anyway. I just chop the green off of the top as you would with chives, basil, parsley, rinse and use. But a guide on dehydrating is below too.

So, weed it all up, wash it. Chop off the bottom root part (just like with Spring Onion), then chop it, from the bulb to the flower, just make sure all of the bulb parts are sliced more thinly, because they take longer to dehydrate. Then wash it again in a bowl/colander, because it tends to collect dirt around the base which is hard to remove. Then I pop it on a cast iron pan (any baking tray is fine) and put it in the oven at 70 degrees till it’s crispy. Once cool, chuck in an airtight jar and use it as a dry herb.

I didn’t cut my bulb parts finely enough, and they were still a bit moist where the greens had dried out. So I picked them out and put them back in the oven for a little longer.

That’s it! The only reason you need to make the effort to grow chives is because onion weed disappears in mid Summer. The other cool thing is that people who can’t tolerate alliums (like onion and garlic) can often tolerate the greens, they are much softer on the stomach. So when I was living with my exwife, who couldn’t have onion or garlic, we just subbed in onion weed (and garlic shoots). That is not medical advice, it just worked for her- so go with whatever medical advice you personally have received, not mine!

Have a fabulous week everyone.