Fork!
Head Gardener with Fork
I've had a revelation - with respect to garden tools, that is. When working upright, I've always been a shovel-and-spade kind of girl. Today I used, for the first time ever, a ladies' garden fork. Wow! Impressive. Brilliant, in fact. It works really well. I love it!
Thursday 21st April
A garden helper-friend arrived in the morning to do some weeding, and than left me her light-weight fork to try out. I spent the rest of the gardening day working with it in the Perennials Garden, removing dandelions and a nasty creeping grass, roots and all (cross fingers).
I've dug up - forked up? lots of Aquilegias, Lychnis, and clumps of summer Phlox, and hopefully I haven't damaged the Aliums. Mind you, giving them a little poke might get them to grow better... I've left the dahlias - they'll still keep flowering until the first frost. Eek! Best not mention that.
This garden has been weedy with dandelions, clover, and grass (possibly twitch) for years, needing something much more serious than a cosmetic scratching. Well, I've done it. Tomorrow I'll go over the soil again for bits of roots left behind, then I'll replant the perennials I've saved.
Now can I back-track to yesterday? Just for the record, I did something a little different : barrowing horse poos and sawdust onto the Stables Garden. A neighbour has dumped a truckload for me, and it's been sitting forlornly on next-door's wasteland, beckoning.
+10 I had a rather satisfying trundling circuit going. A load of river stones for the path edges behind the cottage, then the firewood logs that were doing this job shifted to the back house porch, then off again for more manure mix. The two tabby cats Tiddles and Histeria (whose appetite seems to be improving) were poking around with me. Next door's paddock is rodent paradise.
Friday 22nd April
Yippee! Non-Gardening Partner and I been out walking on the peninsula - a plodding stroll (climbing 460 meters) to the Kaituna Saddle and the Packhorse Hut. The weather was magnificent - as were my knees, though one of them is grumbling a bit now.
Plodding up to the Kaituna Saddle
A most successful day - because I didn't think longingly of my garden once! And good news for lovers of the Round Mount Bradley Trip - large tracts of head-high gorse have finally been cut back from the trail. The path was now as wide as this - the ranger flung his arms open, as if he was going to politely hug me. Hee hee.
Saturday 23rd April
Sulking a bit with one very achy knee - due to over-vigorous, one-legged use of ladies' fork? Oops. Anyway, it was a toss-up. Take a pill and have an afternoon snooze? Or rake up more leaves and burn the bonfire? Of course I did the latter, feeling a little grumpy.
Autumn Driveway
I chopped down the straggly Pseudopanyx blocking the Wattle Woods path and burnt its pieces, too. Thinking, as one does when one plods doggedly back and forth filling the wheelbarrow with leaves : I might re-route the bottom of the little Wattle Woods Stream, letting it wiggle where the dug-out flaxes were. Either I trust my eyes that there's enough slope, or I use a spirit level - or both.
Autumn in the Pond Paddock
The autumn leaves are inspiring. Trees in the driveway are turning golden-yellow, while the trees in the Pond Paddock are rusty-orange. Just like that, almost without me noticing. Just lovely. Best way to stop sulking - walk around the autumn garden and look up (not down, in case one is overwhelmed by weeds).