It was the Romans, apparently, who introduced ground elder to our British Isles, as an edible and medicinal herb, especially for the treatment of gout. However, in the absence of any gout of my own and despite being awfully grateful for other Roman introductions such as straight roads and internal plumbing, I curse them for their wretched ground elder, especially the stuff living in my garden. Which leads me on to...
... the small and flimsy aluminium greenhouse we inherited with Damson Cottage. Because we were financially constrained at the time, it had to serve its purpose for a while as ‘New Greenhouse’ was low on the list of spending priorities. However, it was a drafty edifice and constantly threatening to fall over in a light breeze - in fact, it did exactly that after a couple of years - so in 2020 and with cash in the bank, we bought a cedar wood greenhouse of thrice the size and style, and moved the official greenhouse site to the top of the garden.
The old greenhouse base became home to a Heath Robinson-style cold frame, cobbled together from old bits of wood and perspex. I tried to grow lettuce in it, but the slugs and mice won. And then the ground elder crept across from the surrounding field margins and took over. The cold frame was removed of its perspex lids and became a dumping ground for grass cuttings. And the ground elder continued to make itself at home despite my best efforts to dig it up, decapitate it or smother it with grass cuttings.
I kept looking at this part of the garden. It's at the top of the courtyard steps and next to the oil tank and it occupies a sunny spot. I kept looking at my collection of baby lupins in the greenhouse. It would be a perfect site for them, I thought. Can you imagine it - a raft of colourful lupins every year? Yes, I COULD imagine it!
Besides, I was fed up with waging war on the ground elder year in, year out. SOMETHING needed to be DONE. NOW.
And it has taken three days of digging and sifting and huffing and puffing to do it. Lord Malarkey removed the old aluminium base frame and dug up the slabs that formed the base. I forked and sifted through the soil, pulling out great swathes of ground elder roots and lopping through some wayward roots from the cherry tree across the way. I also evicted some stray mint but left some foxgloves in situ because they promise to be quite magnificent this year and the bumbles love them. I shall have to remember to sift the ground beneath the foxgloves after they have flowered because there will be some ground elder hiding underneath, you mark my words.
Now I have a fairly large flower bed, about eight feet by ten feet, ready to be titivated with some lovely summer colour. I shall plant it up with some cheerful annuals whilst the lupins continue to achieve a decent size in the greenhouse. And I shall be like a Ninja hawk, watching for any stray bits of ground elder to appear.
This morning, because I didn’t learn from the one tonne bag of gravel experience I had last month, I took delivery of a one tonne bag of top soil for the raised veg beds. It arrived at 8.30 a.m. This time, it needed transporting up the entire length of the garden which is a fair old yomp, part of it up an incline. I employed my trusty wheelbarrow/bucket/spade combo and the gravel formula of 3 x spadefuls = 1 bucketful and 4 bucket fulls = 1 wheelbarrow load. Up and down the six steps with the bucket to get to the wheelbarrow which was parked at the top of the patio steps, then wheel the full barrow up the garden to the raised beds to be tipped in and raked out. Back and forth, and up and down. It took me just over two hours to shift it all. Nell was a useless under gardener.
However, I am thrilled with how the veg beds look now! The top soil on top of the multipurpose compost will make for excellent veg growing conditions and with the middle of May approaching, I shall soon be doing a lot of seedling transplanting and direct sowing.
I also purchased a sack of something called Strulch which I’ve used to mulch the new strawberry bed. It has an odd scent to it, sort of sweet like silage but with a tang of iron. It claims to keep the slugs at bay. It hasn’t succeeded in keeping Nell the Poo at bay, so I shall be installing some netting to protect the emerging flowers and baby fruits from her rampant paws.
Tomorrow, I am expecting the postman to deliver 500g of tiger worms.
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