Day Woon (Geordie accent) in the shepel* from where I will be making most of my posts. The intensity of the bird song coming through the thin wooden walls is as if I'm sitting in a small garden beneath a tree full of nightingales rather than on the edge of a 15 acre field. Good work blackbirds, finches and assorted unidentified others! (Must swot up on my ornithology).
This is my favourite time - the sun's descent well under way and the stillness a blank but vivid canvas for the aforementioned twittering and fluting of my winged companions.
Spring was leapfrogged today and we were straight into summer. We've not had rain here for a while so I decided to water and weed this year's currant and elder cuttings. I have three new rows of currants directly in front of the shepel.
This is a rather hazy view of them from my armchair. They've all been planted in my 'Lazy Boy' style: rows rotavated, mulch mat laid over them and hardwood cuttings taken from existing plants and slotted straight through the mat at one leap's spacing. Conventional practice is to nurture your hardwood cuttings in well tended beds, dig them up the following year once they've rooted and then plant out where you want them. All too much of a pavlova IMO and I've had success with my Lazy Boy style in the past.
The row closest to the shepel is something of vanity project -
Currant Tricolore, in which I have planted alternate black, red and white currants. Favouring this row I make sure that the holes in the mulch matting are big enough not to pull against the stem of the cuttings. Flaps of matting created by increasing the hole sizes are carefully weighed down with stones so as not to leave room for weeds.
Surprisingly, elder cuttings have proved to be a bit less robust than blackcurrant ones and where these have died off in the rows I replaced them this winter. I go round watering these.
Here is one of the little blighters, just a few months old.
FYI here is a cousin, two and a bit years old.
More about wine less about plants in the next post, but now the shepel is calling to be known...
* Shepel: Half shed/half chapel on the northwest boundary of the field where the fruit is grown.
Peeping shepel
INT shepel
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