The last few years we have had gloriously sunny Mays and this year seemed set for the same. The sun was riding high, the garden was a riot of tulips and cherry blossom. Our clay soil ground was baked so hard any weeds had to be chiselled out and it seemed a whole lot easier just to sit and let them go out of focus whilst I concentrated on a tub of ice cream. Anyway, things were looking pretty good even if I did say so myself. I cheerfully washed down the gin terrace chairs and invested in a few pelargoniums. And then I made the classic mistake. Yes – I ordered a sun shade. Since that fateful day when I screwed the base parts together, the temperature has plummeted and the rain gauge filled mightily. The top half has never made it out of its plastic bag. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Mightily disgruntled, I threw myself into other ventures for a few days. When I came out of the sulks, I put the gardening shorts back in the drawer, hauled out my thickest joggies and a fleece and went out to survey the situation. The rain had done wonders for the dark blue camassia, which managed to catch up with the marsh marigolds. In fact all of the borders were suddenly looking rather lush. But the weeds….what had been a few innocuous seedlings was now a mayhem of rampant swathes of sticky wullie and three foot thistles. Battle commenced between showers.
Yesterday the forecast was dismal and I had downloaded an appropriate murder for consumption in the greenhouse. However, after a rocky start the sun shone steadily and a convenient power outage in the pond pump dried up the stream so I had a rather slimy afternoon clearing out the stream bed. Once the slither of weeds and decomposing leaves were removed I found a positive nest of mares tail in the top half which I carefully sprayed with Keith’s magic potion (thank you google – the stuff actually works) and decided not to reset the fuse and reactivate the flow for 24 hours to let it penetrate. It was when I was clearing up, anticipating a long bath and a well earned sweetie, that I realised I had grabbed the wrong spray and had been assiduously coating the errant spears with squeezy liquid. I trudged up to the garden store for the right stuff and began again…
Anyway, I’m secretly glad about the rain. Things were getting rather stressed and it’s too big an area to be running around with watering cans. In the quadrant bed at the bottom even after several days of rain it’s still very dry, with the growing oaks hoovering up all the moisture. My decision to remove most of the herbaceous plants in that area feels vindicated. The lupins especially really suffered last year. The bulbs for the early season, before the winter wet was all used up, were lovely and the bearded iris which I bulked up seem to be happy enough for now, so I just need to give bit more thought to what will be drought resistant for the summer (assuming the curse of the sun shade will not last too much longer… )
