By Victoria Plum
I was tidying up in the garden this week. Really I think of it as straightening rather than tidying, as it’s just setting a sort of order to stray flower pots and weeds, tying stuff up, cutting other stuff down – I had to cut down some very vigorous vine sprays.
My vines, like all my deep-rooted plants, have continued to grow through this difficult gardening summer and have been particularly quick to put on an extra growth spurt since the limited recent rain fell.
I cut them down and immediately thought, since I try to waste very little, that I should keep the best of the leaves in the freezer, which is what my Greek friends do, for making dolmathes. (In fact, I don’t make dolmathes; it’s far too fiddly and they never taste the same in this country anyway.)
So I fell to thinking how to make use of the luscious leaves. Yes, I thought, I’ll put them in my (compost) hot bin, where the moist greenery would help to make up for the lack of grass mowings this year.
Then I thought I could implement a labour-saving shortcut: I could just leave the leaves on the ground (saving the trip to the bin and the trip back next year with the compost) as part of that crucial strategy of regenerative gardening, which is protecting and feeding the soil rather than just raping it to grow your plants in the short term.
My garden looked fabulous early in the year, but as growth died off (I’m thinking particularly of day lilies here) I just left the dead leaves on the ground because I knew that if I cut the old and scorched leaves away completely, the soil would have had no protection from the blistering sun.
So that has been the pattern this summer: to leave old plant matter on the soil surface to give respite to the tiny invertebrates that are working for my soil health and a layer of protection against the baking sun.
I acknowledge that the dead leaves don’t look pretty but the long-term health of my plants and soil is more important to me.
Above: A fly on my hollyhocks (look up flies on Wikipedia for some astonishing sights). Below: A spider and spiderlings at Oulton Chapel this summer. Photos: Tina Sutton
So my straightening up now is to clear the thickest layers of leaves to let the rain get through, although lots of the leaves have broken down by themselves now, primroses for instance.
My next job is to rake the grass as vigorously as I can to get up as much dead stuff as possible, and then when rain is forecast strew some lawn seed in the worst-hit places.
I regard watering a lawn a sin and a terrible waste of water as grass always recovers remarkably well, but I bought the seed early in the year and grass seed doesn’t keep well so I might as well use it up to thicken the sward and repair the excavations my daughter’s puppy enjoyed making.
I am looking forward to the next Reepham & District Gardening Club meeting on Tuesday 20 September, at 7.45 pm in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham (there will of course be tea and cake).
The speaker will be Dr Ian Bedford, a retired research entomologist and a down-to-earth scientist, who will tell us about “Bugs on the Move” – clever insects and invertebrates.
As laypeople we know so little of the vast insect world and yet all life depends on it. For instance there are countless sorts of beetles – just look on Wikipedia, where you will find the array truly astonishing.