1 January 2019

I thought I'd posted this way back at the beginning of the year . . . Obviously not! 

Happy New Year to you all! It's been a lovely day here today. Nice and warm. We didn't do much last night except watch TV - although we did stay up till midnight to welcome the new year in. I went in to the city soon after midnight to pick up a couple of young ones from the city. Then home to bed!

Yesterday I went up the back to begin to restore order to overwhelming garden chaos. Under there is one of the garden beds! The black bag is pretty full of the lily (arum maculatum) spikes. Back in September I'd pulled some of the leaves from a patch of this garden. It was interesting that there were no spikes where I'd pulled the leaves out. As well as the lilies there is a mass of convulvulus.

Each one of those spike heads contains berries, which are beginning to ripen. Then they drop off, or the spike head goes onto the ground which means each seed is a potential plant! So they need to go.

This is one of the tubers and it's around 8 - 10cms across and quite starchy looking. It's gone into one of the bags as well. All in all I filled up three bags of the spikes, two today and one a few days ago. They can be quite deep down too but this one was just lying on the surface.

Here is the same garden bed after a couple of hours work. Quite a number of seeds fell off when I was moving them into the bag however I'll be able to pull them out if they sprout. The raised edge is falling apart so we are going to rebuild it. Boar is thinking of extending it to the fence. I'd planned to do the other bed the today but ran out of the plastic bags as I discovered when I went up the back this morning.

Instead of that I mostly stacked branches Boar was chopping down. I also took some plant material out of a couple of buckets that had been sitting there since September and which I'd forgotten about since it was a while since I'd been up the back. I was going to chuck it out but then decided it would make good fertiliser so I strained it through a piece of windbreak into the buckets.

The rest of the photos show the ivy we need to get rid of, and the pile of branches we were left with.