Gardening
Stories
Some
of my experiences of keeping the garden in order:
Taming the Grass
One of the regular garden tasks is mowing the grass. We have three types of grass area – rough, which we call the ‘lawn’; very rough, which we call the ‘meadow’ (it would be a paddock if we kept horses); and almost inaccessible, which, not unnaturally, we call the ‘rough bits’.
The
lawn, a mixture mainly of grass, daisies and clover, is at least reasonably
flat, and we have always mown this with a cylinder mower, for a long time an
electric one, more recently a petrol mower.
Even on our poor standard of grass, the cylinder mower cut is preferable
– it’s closer, the grass clippings are removed efficiently and there is just
the hint of the striped finish so beloved of the advertisers. There is an impression that cylinder mowers
do not work on wet grass, while rotaries cut under all conditions. This is a misconception in my experience.
Cylinder
mowers work perfectly well in the wet:
their cut is virtually unaffected.
The heavier wet clippings are perhaps less efficiently collected and you
will find them sticking to the box and on the mower – but this is a purely
cosmetic effect. The rotary mower,
however, is critically dependent on having dry grass if its collection system
is to work at all (the clippings have to be blown out rather than launched
forward by a powerful cylinder blade); and, if you don’t want to collect the
clippings, you will find that, in wet conditions, a rotary leaves untidy clumps
of them behind at best, or clogs the outlet or even blade at worst, and the
mower will lose power, or sometimes stall.
My
advice, therefore, for a limited area of grass, which you wish to call a lawn,
is to stick to cylinder mowing for a better finish in all conditions.
For
larger areas of rougher grass, the rotary is the realistic answer for the
amateur. They are robust and
affordable, and do a good job in dry conditions – worth waiting for even if it
means another week’s growth. We have a
ride-on for the main area, and a pushed one for more awkward and smaller areas,
like garden paths and so on.
For
the really rough areas, on banks or along the stream, for example, a nylon line
strimmer is a godsend. Our old 2-stroke
petrol one is sometimes hard to start, and is quite heavy to use, but at least
it does the job. I can’t imagine how
long it would take with sickle or shears.
I
suppose for the sake of completeness, I should mention a fourth method of
controlling the grass – weed killer. I
use it sparingly, but it’s essential on the gravelled drive. If you look carefully, you will see that
many local councils routinely use weed killer on grass verges and similar
places, where grass abuts path or kerb, so that the edges don’t get shaggy
(without using an army of shearers or strimmers). So I do use it to deal with such areas as are particularly
awkward or unsightly. The price (it’s
not cheap) anyway discourages more general use.
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RIP
Someone
observed in the Guardian a few months ago that the corpses of dead wild animals
were never seen. Not my experience at
all. I have found and buried a wide
variety of species over the years. This
is a list of them (the vertebrates at least – I exclude insects and all other
things that crawl and creep). But, not
to disagree entirely with the observation, I suspect that most of these
unfortunate beasts suffered an untimely end.
R. I. P
Blackbird
Blue tit
Fox
Frog
Hedgehog
Marten
Mole
Mouse
Pigeon
Rat
Rook
Shrew
Sparrow
Starling
Toad
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Garden
Pests
Over
the years, a succession of animals has staked their claim to our crops.
Some
we have beaten off – the minority.
Some
have agreed to share with us.
For
the rest, we have either capitulated, or they have beaten us in open combat,
fair and square.
I
wish I could call this note ‘helpful hints’, but I’m baffled. Please let me know if you have the answers –
any of them.
These
are some of our adversaries.
Badger. A
most elusive beast, we have never actually seen him. But we believe he is responsible for the destruction of two
crops. We used to grow sweet corn. Just before the cobs ripened, Mr Badger
would flatten the plants and half eat the corn. Every year. Like
clockwork. We gave up.
I think he also likes carrots. Each year, about the time one says, ‘they
should be just about big enough’, something grubs up the whole row the day
before you decide to try them. Our
badger has an uncanny sense of timing.
Since Kenneth Grahame, the badger has had a most
wholesome reputation … on paper. But
in reality, it’s a dangerous adversary, and we haven’t bested it yet.
Pigeons. They like the peas, but are relatively easy
to defend against. We use any old metal
mesh protection – old office in-trays, pram baskets and so on – on each new row
in turn. Once the pea is reasonably
sturdy and the mesh is removed, stick the peas immediately. Natural twigs make it too awkward for the
birds and our crops are untouched.
Slugs.
Attack strawberries and potatoes.
Surround the former with slug pellets.
If you dislike chemicals in the garden, don’t grow strawberries. See also ‘mice’.
Eel
worm. We used to mourn our main crop,
such a good yield but so few untouched by these nasty pests. It’s difficult anyway to compete with the
supermarkets’ selection nowadays, so we’ve given up the main crop. But what money cannot buy is the taste of
young new potatoes, only minutes out of the soil. You can’t get this from the shops, so we sow first and second
early still. They’re lifted before the
pests take charge.
Mice. On the whole, more of a worry in the house
(not often, touch wood!) than outside. But
this year something bit through the stalks of all our ripe strawberries. Didn’t eat them, just bit them off so they
rotted on the ground. We suspect mice. We’ll try a few plants in pots on the patio,
but we’re giving up on growing them in the open.
Mole. I have to say that the mole scarcely ever
ventures as far as the vegetable plot.
I don’t know why. I have
childhood memories of whole rows of seedlings being uprooted by the mole’s
spring wanderings. Here, he keeps to
the grass. But the full panoply of
deterrents – smokes, mothballs, ultra-sound – have failed to dislodge him.
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Last amended 22 November 2000.