Mulch

A fair bit of the weekend's been spent dealing with the 6m³ of mulch that arrived on Thursday. After putting a good layer on the vegetable garden then, on Saturday we worked along the fruit beds, giving the currants and berries a thick mat. We spared a bit for the rhubarb, too, which I've already spread several trugs of compost onto, but more is definitely better for this hungry perennial. I think we'll take our first harvest next weekend: the oldest Timperley Early is doing well (and is earliest!).

The fruit beds will get a weed-suppressing layer of cardboard, and then a topping of chippings, when we next have some: this reduces the weeding so much that it only needs an annual blitz (my job yesterday), which is much better.

We've also gone along the fruit trees on the hillside (excluding the apple walk, and the pear 'Hessle', as they're too small to need it), putting a trug full of mulch under each one's anti-weed membrane. The ornamental plums are on the verge of coming into leaf and flowering.

The heuchera/quince bed is a little too full of rather dainty spring bulbs to want to mulch it (should have done so in January or February!), so we've filled two Dalek-style composters with mulch, on a nearby path, ready to spread once the bulbs die back. Lesson learnt for 2015.

That still left us with a good heap of mulch, so the last job today was spreading twenty-odd trugs over the long border. This bank is reasonably fertile, having had cotoneaster leaves dropping on it annually for twenty years, but it could still do with building up. Liz had been weeding the bank over Thursday, Saturday, and today, so the mulch has gone (as it should) straight onto clear ground, and it looks really good.

While she weeded, I've tidied the over-grown grass in the wild-er bit near the flowering currant and behind the copse bed. I should, really, have strimmed this in late autumn, as it's now full of daffodils, which obviously I don't want to damage. This made it a manual job, which is more tedious, but there you go.

Last short job yesterday was digging an exploratory trench to work out the fate of the land drain we uncovered when preparing the bed for the sweetpeas last spring. We've gone about two metres up-hill, on the other side of the path (which I didn't want to disturb just yet), and found two breaks in the pipe -- but no herringbone joint yet. I'm still hoping that we'll find some: there's no chance it's draining the whole section of garden unless there's either herringbone drains running off from it, or a second drain (hitherto undiscovered) further along. That said, the broken sections, which have filled with organic debris, would explain why they're not working. It's going to take a bit more work to get to the bottom of it all.

This afternoon, my digging was on the opposite side of the garden, as I was preparing what will become beds in front/beside the beech bench. I've cleared the turf from both, but only dug over the bed above the bench (very stony and laborious). The soil's quite nice, actually, once the stones are prised out. Fortunately, one bed was enough to plant 28 lavenders out, as a border, which has freed up enough 2½–3" pots to pot up the 'Alicanta' tomato seedlings that have been outgrowing their communal pots.

Astonishingly, it actually feels like we're more-or-less on track, without too many specific or substantial jobs that should have been done but which we've not got round to. As for actually managing to mulch 'on schedule'... I'm sure it shan't last.