A Hedgerow with Principles

Venus was very bright in the SE sky this morning first thing. And when the sun came up it was a beautiful bright morning as I walked up to the University, all the puddles on the pavements frozen in the first sub-zero temperatures of the year. Good to be alive and breathing the cool air, glad I didn't wait for the bus. Inevitably thinking about the allotment rather than my studies. I need to be realistic about how much I can get done this winter. Maybe 2 or 3 hours at the weekend, and maybe the same during the week. Weather forecasts after the BBC Scotland news are one of the few things on telly that I take a serious interest in.

The Pond and the drainage are going to take months at this rate. So that got me thinking about the hedgerow: I can't really plant it until I get the levels right. Which might be well into the spring, too late for hedge planting. And that led me on to thinking about the rightness buying stuff. I could get 400 hawthorn bare roots for a £200 or thereabouts. Almost instant hedgerow... But it's not really the allotmenteer way... I've got hundreds of gorse seeds. I can get hundreds of hawthorn seeds. I've stratified and grown both plants in the past. Never mind those bare root people, I'm going to grow a hedgerow from seed. Free. It's the principle of the thing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leech or flatworm? Ants and Swiss Chard

Image
For the 2nd time in a week or so, (1st time regarding dwarf beans ), I'm following Alys Fowler's advice, this time with regard to Swiss chard .  Long story short, after midsummer plants which often bolt if planted in spring will resist the impulse to do so, probably because of shortening days; (I say shortening, but in Glasgow, in July, we're still getting 18 hours of daylight).   I got a packet of Bright Lights , at a good price, (another reason to wait until July before sowing, lots of bargains, I've noticed). But where to sow them? Most of the 2nd bed is under a tarpaulin, but it wasn't quite big enough to cover the whole bed, so the last 5ft or so went under a sheet of plastic, (in the background of the photo in this post, here .) Transparent plastic was a foolish idea, weeds were growing underneath it, so I covered most of it with sheets of metal from the old shed. I decided to leave the tarp, but use the area beneath the plastic for the chard. Who-ah there...
Read more

"Chevy Chase. Fuck ever happen to him?"

Image
As Paulie Walnuts said in The Sopranos. It got me thinking. As it happens, he's been working steadily , but you can see what Paulie means. It's like that with film and television actors: you don't see them in anything for a year or two, and you wonder if they're dead or perhaps on a lengthy charlie and booze session. Or maybe doing proper acting on the stage? Only appearing on the telly gives them meaning to us. That video with Paul Simon was on one of the cable music channels the other day. It always makes me smile. As for Paulie and the rest of the crew, the clock's ticking. Of course, America already knows how things finish, but we don't. My mate Ian was telling me about a friend of his, visiting the States a few weeks ago, flicking through the channels in his hotel bedroom, he hit on a repeat of THE final episode, just beginning. What a quandry! He watched it, as it goes, but kept shtum when he came home.
Read more

How many pallets can you fit in the back of a Fiat 500?

Image
At least 1. Maybe I could have got 3 altogether, at a pinch. Also 200+ gorse seeds, which have begun to look in danger of damping off, so I'm thinking they'll be better off at the allotment in the fresh air. I'm worried about slugs, snails and woodpigeons, though, so I put them in a wheelbarrow, covered with a net. Also this morning, planted a row of beetroot detroit.
Read more