Lavender and Bean

More rain for the garden at the end of August meant the flowers were looking battered and the veg bedraggled too.  So we did some more structural maintenance on the trees and larger shrubs in between the downpours.

The boomerang bed came in for some trimming, as – quite randomly it seems – a whole branch of the Indian Bean Tree (Catalpa) simply died for no apparent reason.  One day it was healthy, with flowers just blooming – the next day it just withered.  Amputation of the dead limb was the clear solution.  While I was at it I gave the shrubs underneath it a hair cut too as they were beginning to overcome the Catalpa – although I don’t think the branch died through overcrowding from some jumped up shrubs.

Elsewhere I tidied up other stuff in the drive and I even managed to get JB Jr to hack and prune the Cotoneaster at the front so we still have a room with a view.  He loathes the task, but I reckon his youth and height qualify him far better to do the job than his slipped-disc-cartilage-deficient father.

Down the veg patch the battle still rages with the caterpillars.  An acquaintance the other day proudly announced that she did not believe in killing the Brassica browsing thugs, and said that her plants would survive intact with happy butterfly larvae.  We do not hold with such do goody good liberal-minded hippy shit.  Mrs B takes it as personal affront that anyone other ourselves is eating our plants so the other day we donned the gloves of doom and squished caterpillars till we had both broken the three dart maximum of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIGHTEEE!  We thought our cabbages, purple sprouting and brussels would be much better off without nearly four hundred predators munching their leaves.  The only misjudgment we think we made was Mrs B wearing a white shirt to squish green caterpillars.

(I can see this being the next washing powder commercial….Anguished housewife to camera: “but how can I get squashed caterpillar stains out of my husband’s white t-shirt?”).