Clawing through the storms
Morena everyone! Well I want to be smug about the weather, and tell you that you definitely shouldn’t have planted out your summer veges yet… but at our last job on Friday, (central Newtown, for Wellingtonians), the entire driveway was lined in 40cm high, perfectly happy tomato plants- they had survived all sorts of weather in the last few weeks and looked perfectly happy!
We have had a intensely busy week over here, some cool things have happened-
I spoke earlier about my idea of strapping huge fenceposts to cabbage trees, to straighten them. The cabbage trees are extremely unimpressed but they are straighter. This entire thing has been overtaken by events, though- we are just going to use the cabbage trees on a site where they can be wonky- which is a bit of a pity as I would have loved to make it work somehow. I wish I could take some photos but it is a restricted site, and I had to bollocks out a labourer for taking photos (he must think I am a touch mad for strapping trees and watching him delete photos off his phone, given you can see the strapped trees from the street if you know where to look).
We are in the midst of landscaping a property in Seatoun, and the next step is to remove multiple cubic metres of sand. I don’t really know how the sand has managed to stay put to be honest- it is clinging to a steep slope. We have started moving the sand offsite, it is going to be mixed with our compost to create lawn mix and we will make sure all of our lawns are nice and flattened (by ‘all’ I mean ‘actually very few’ but I am very excited nonetheless). Free sand! Just for the cost of…substantial labour!
I spread predatory mites in my chicken coop. They eat red mites, the little bugs which suck chicken’s blood.
While this is an exciting development, all that consisted of was an order to Bio Force, and then spreading what looks like ash around the chicken coop, then done..
I also spread king stropharaia mycelium around my vege beds! I love king stropharia (wine cap mushrooms) and have finally pulled the trigger on getting them for my place, after an enormous amount of preplanning/forethought. Here’s the sheet that came with it, which was pretty helpful, I ended up putting the spawn around the edges as I have heard that they like that sort of area.
And finally, I cut the entire top off of an ivy with a chainsaw. It was immediately gratifying and reduced the ‘hedge’ to ‘ivy on a fence’ about 60cm lower than previously, so that felt good. Chainsaws can be great for this sort of thing- it stops the ongoing slow chop-chop-chop of using tools which cut individual bits at a time, and saves the hedgetrimmer blades, which aren’t designed for cutting 4cm thick shoots.
Yay for husqvarna battery tools!
Tasks for the week
I can tell you all that we have planned for the week ahead is mowing, weeding, mulching, mowing, weeding, mulching.
This week I went to a property where I had dared to skip a mow, in order to spend the time on other tasks. The grass was shin height. It took a good 7hrs to mow it back down and the team advised me that it is done but looks terrible- we have to redo it on Monday, there’s no real wriggle room at this time of year for skipping much of anything!
Rains and injuries have set us back pretty massively the past 4 weeks as well, so some of our landscaping jobs have dragged on and we are now weeding areas that we hadn’t quoted to weed, because we should have come and gone at those jobs by now. Humpf!
I have to say I am still somewhat unimpressed by the selection in the garden shops at the moment in terms of flowering plants. I bought some lavender but don’t feel that they were quite ready for sale, as the roots were extremely weak. I should have listened to my gut, but planted them, and they all curled up and died :( At least this was at my house and no one else’s!
What I prescribe for you is some solid catch up time, yourself!