A day under the hazels

After weeks of mostly wet and miserable weather, at last three beautiful, sunny days – a chance to get out and get on with garden jobs, despite the frosty weather.  (It didn’t last long; today was foggy, damp and milder, and there’s more of the same in the forecast.)  The frost only melted where the sun got on to it, which limited access to some parts of the garden to avoid walking on frozen grass, and the soil was still wet and sticky after all the rain, so I spent time weeding the vegetable garden paths and tackling the bottom corner of the veg plot. 

Work in progress

The far end of the veg garden contains a shelter belt consisting of two big hazel bushes.  When we moved here, I brought several plants in pots with me, and two of the pots sprouted hazel plants – some of our squirrels had buried nuts in there as a farewell present.  I planted them on the edge of the veg plot, to protect it from the easterly winds, and they have grown into quite tall trees, which I have dismally failed to prune over the years.  As a result they not only cast shade in that corner, but also sprawled out over the path adjoining the corner bed, making access, and hence maintenance, difficult.  That bed currently contains a few aquilegia plants grown from seed and awaiting more suitable quarters (one reason I want to get on with clearing the shady area behind the front garden wall) and not much else; the space right in the corner has for some time served as a parking place for buddleja prunings used as bean poles and the like, and the strip under the hazels had been colonised by herb bennet (a wildflower, not edible) and damson suckers.  And the boards that are supposed to demarcate the bed edges had fallen over and were lying in the path, making access even more tricky.

Serious pruning of the hazels has been deferred to another day, but the first step was to clear proper access to the area by cutting back some of the lower branches, so that I didn’t poke myself in the eye while weeding.  Most of the damson suckers were dug out, although a couple have come up in the cluster of hazel trunks and nothing will get them out, so I’ll just have to keep an eye on them and rub off any shoots that appear.  An old and unproductive rhubarb plant was also dug out and thrown away.  Weeding the area was less of a struggle than I had expected, although there are a lot of weed seedlings appearing, so once I’ve tackled the hazel pruning I will mulch the area heavily and probably leave it for a year or so.  One legacy of the lack of attention given to the area is that fallen leaves have just been left there to rot, so I’ll pile up those leaves that haven’t yet made their way to the leaf mould bins and leave the worms to get on with it, with the mulch on top.

My gardening companion

At least there are quite a few worms in there, although some of them fell prey to the bottom-of-the-garden robin, a friendly and trusting little chap (or chapess) who pops up whenever I go down there and sings to me.  Much of the singing is territory-defending, directed at the other local robins, of which there are quite a few, but sometimes it’s a very quiet warbling clearly directed at me; I’m never sure whether it’s a ‘please go away so that I can safely come down and look for food’, a ‘please carry on and dig up more worms’ or just ‘this is really nice’.  Anyway, he had a very happy afternoon picking over where I had been working - and I thoroughly enjoyed his company.