[Smashy the Hammer] [An Aspiring Luddite]
I carry no phone
An aspiring Luddite
In a wired world.
[Jeff Berry]
Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.


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The Cunning Idea
The garden has been coming together. With our usual weekend excursions and meetings on hold, the garden has been receiving more attention than usual. We finished the demolition of the hated pampas grass, which left us with two circular holes in the lawn. One of those, with the help of bricks from the wind-damaged wall, has become a keyhole raised bed, as discussed in previous articles.

The other has become our Bee-Berm. It's not technically a berm, I suppose. It's more of a mound. Bee-Berm just has such wonderful alliteration! Whatever it's called, it's a rough, raised area, which we are going to try to make into a bee garden. Mostly this means leaving it alone, but there are a few steps we can take to help. A Dorset company makes Bee Bombs, little packets of wildflower seeds, soil, and clay which encourage bees. My wife scattered those across the Honeybee-Hummock (just trying that name on for size). We also purchased a few perennial 'cottage garden' flowers to add to the mix. (No, I'm not sure what defines a flower as a 'cottage garden' plant, but that's what it said at the shop, and they looked pretty.) A few seedlings of two kinds of lavender, and the Bee-Barrow was nearly complete.

The crowning glory is a rosemary. This particular rosemary is an old friend. It was one of the first, if not the very first, plants we bought when we moved to England, and has come with us on two house-movings, as well as contributing flavour to a great many sauces and roasts. After all those years of faithful service in a pot, it was time for the old soldier to be put out to pasture - literally, if you have a liberal interpretation of the word 'pasture.' My wife carefully prepared a place for it and made the transfer. Look at the lovely flowers already appearing! Fear not, a younger plant has taken over the job in the pot, now placed on the front porch.

That means the Old Soldier atop the Hive-Hill, two rosemary in the keyhole bed, and another out front. We like rosemary. We like the look, the taste, and, outside in particular, the lovely smell.

On to the Cunning Idea ...

Our deck, parts of which are visible in many of these photos, is, like so many of the things which are falling apart, probably 35 years old. And falling apart. We've known since day one, that we would have to demolish it and do ... something with the space. We held off because we didn't know what was under there, and until we were ready to do something, we thought that leaving it covered was the better part of valour.

With the lockdown, I had time to look at it bit more closely, and look under a couple of the decking boards that had failed, and see what we would be dealing with. It was not too bad, actually. There are long structural beams running from the stone patio towards the bottom of the garden, spaced about twenty inches apart. Every sixty-seven inches or so, there is a cross-brace, offset by half that length in alternate rows. The ground was covered with pretty sturdy weed barrier and wasn't overgrown or mucky. So, essentially we had a bunch of 20x67 boxes, with some half-size boxes at the ends, all empty. Do you see where I'm going with this?

As proof of concept, I pulled up the decking from the first four rows, where the long beams define the rows, up to that first sixty-seven inch point, and put separators in at the same point where the cross-bracing was. That gave us eight 20x34(ish) boxes. Then we designed.

Conceptually we have a 6x8 array of boxes that size, which we can designate as beds or paths. We had a few cocktails and brainstormed about where we would need paths - any bed more than two rows wide would make it difficult to get to the middle of the bed, unless it was it at one of the ends and you could access it that way. The current planning diagram looks like this.

Then it was to time to get rolling. I had nearly 500 litres of compost ready to go and a stack of plants. The mint from the keyhole was moved to one of the beds here. A friend pointed out that mint will tend to take over, if it can, so we decided putting it in a place where we could box it off was probably a good idea. The gap in the keyhole bed was filled with tarragon seeds. We put in seven tomatoes, three or four different varieties, a horseradish that I bought on impulse, marjoram, coriander, sage, and some more thyme. The tomatoes were mulched in with grass clippings.

That means we still have nineteen unallocated beds. They won't all go to kitchen garden, though. There will be some ornamental plants involved. We've not decided what to with them, and, to a first approximation, won't tear up the decking until we have a plan for the exposed space. We do have some idea. Raspberries are an appealing idea, and might easily take up a bed or two. We're not in a huge rush, and if some of it doesn't happen this year, that's not a big deal.

One final note. I mentioned the local tortie, the latest in a string of neighbourhood cats who wander through our back garden in search of a nice place to poop. We try to discourage this in a variety of ways. Last time, I talked about using a lattice of sticks. In this pictures, you can see the latest development in the anti-feline-feces arms race: white plastic forks. This was my wife's idea, although I do not know if it is original to her. The principle is simple: no cat wants to squat on a fork. We have found them to be oddly attractive, though, especially in the Bee Berm, where they make a sort of coronet around the rising mound of plants.


Luddite'sLog, 16 April 2020
© 2020 Jeff Berry


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