Midlife Gardener

In October, when I discovered that my big brother had already planted his spring bulbs and even sown his sweet peas, I decided to use my blog posts to see when I had previously planted bulbs and so I read my post from 2019 to check what I did right then.  Sadly, delving into events of the past two years is a potentially upsetting exercise – like raking over the embers of a massive fire, they appear harmless, but underneath the grey ash, the coals are deep and hot.  And they continue to burn – I fear they always will.  The pictures on that post show bulbs neatly placed in pots, on a bed of compost ready to be made snug.  There is a photo of the grey wagtail that appeared as if by magic and has returned this year, flying at the patio doors like an anxious spirit. 

The pictures are gloomy, in my mind if not in reality.  But I remember the spring show that followed my efforts that day as being the best I have ever achieved with bulbs, so this year I hope to surpass them.  Which might explain the trigger-happy internet shopping spree that led to a large box of bulbs being delivered to my door in November.  So this year I am going large on bulbs and sweet peas, in an effort to ensure a vibrant colourful spring in the Midlife Garden.

I made up some potting compost to my own random recipe.  To a base of New Horizon peat-free compost I added a little left over builders’ sand and a scoop of slow-release fertilizer that has been hanging around since being retrieved from the Old Place.  (How slow release does slow-release fertilizer have to be before it passes its use by date?)  The key ingredient, though, is horse manure.  I have been up and down the lane collecting wheelbarrow loads of the well-rotted organic gold dust from one of our neighbours – the same one who advised on action before motivation two years ago.  The consistency is fine-grained and friable and I am hoping that it will provide plenty of sustenance to any bulb or seed. 

So, in the New and Year and spring I hope to see narcissi, muscari and tulips filling the tubs, while crocuses push through the lawn, snowdrops glint in the borders and snakes head fritillaries dip their heads bashfully in the wild flower garden.  At least, by my actions these past couple of weeks, I can at least of given myself some hope for the New Year. 

I continue to use gardening to help me cope with the stresses and strife of life and if the definition of mindfulness is “a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique”, then I would add owning a dog to the list of things that contribute to my mental well-being.

We have two dogs. Firstly, there is our own Therapy Dog, in the shape of Ella: the chilled, empathetic labrador who is always there for you and who patiently listens to any of your woes. She is the GOAT when it comes to dogs that we have owned. She is quiet, calm, obedient and long-suffering and actually comes to back us when we call her.

And then there is Badger.

‘Mindfulness’ has a different connotation for him. It is something that involves his mind being full. Full of the fuzz of excitement as he follows trails around the fields of Somerset. So full of such stuff, so busy is he interpreting the scents around him, there is no room in his little Dachshund head for a simple idea like “I should go back to those humans who are calling my name and whistling incessantly”. As the vet said, by way of explaination: “He’s a hound”.

The latest example of this hound’s mind-full-ness occurred on our morning walk at the weekend. All was going fine until he suddenly picked up the scent of who-knows-what. No amount of calling and bribing with treats was going to distract him from quartering and re-quartering the dewy grass which must have been criss-crossed with the aroma of herds of deer, and whole communities of rabbits, badgers and mice. His mood was evidenced by his tail, which was wagging up, down and sideways like a demented conductor’s baton.

Calling was pointless. So physical removal was the only option. Impersonating a keen Collie, I made a long, looping outrun to get behind my own dog, hoping to shepherd him away from the woods and pond, towards the lane. Once in position, I elected to run at the dog, waving my arms and screaming like a berserker, hoping to wake him from his trance to then follow me to the gate. Instead, he started running to outflank me.

At this point in events I had an out-of-body experience, viewing myself in Ultra HD running, in wellies, through the damp grass. Just a few feet away, moving parallel to me, was the silver dapple Sausage. Although he was not wearing wellies, he was still struggling to get ahead of me as the grass was longer than his stubby legs. But he was not deterred. We eyed each other as we ran, and in retrospect I can hear the football pundits’ commentary describing the action:

“It’s poor defending there. It is clear that the dog wants to cut inside on his left foot, so the defender needs to show him the outside channel. It looks as if he has him going that way, but he over-commits and – I have to say – that’s a magnificent change of direction from the wee man as he dips his shoulder and leaves the old timer for dead. He’s beaten the offside trap and is through the fence and into the woods. Brilliant play. But you have to ask yourself: what is the Midlife Gardener doing there?”

It was something I was asking myself as I watched the north end of a south facing Dachshund disappearing into the undergrowth. As he passed me, I barely had enough breath to tell him he was a runt, or something similar.

He led me a merry dance for another ten mintues before accepting a treat in return for the attachment of a lead and a walk home in stoney silence. I should have been angry, frustrated, annoyed, but I was not. Mr Long continues to make us laugh every day. Even when I was chasing him around the field, I have to admit there were benefits, as it was the most intense cardiovascular workout I have had in months.

Rafa Benitez has been urging his players at Everton to turn off the Xbox* (*other gaming consoles are available) and spend more time in the great outdoors. It seems Rafa himself is a keen gardener and, according to The Daily Star “The green-fingered Spaniard has told his Premier League squad to take a leaf out of his own book and get outdoors.” I would wholeheartedly support those sentiments, but would also suggest they get a dachshund like Mr Long. Not only will the players increase their mindfulness by getting out in the fresh air to walk said dog, they might also work on their own sprinting, fitness and tactical positioning too. A win-win.

Meteorologically, winter is over. Spring was sprung on the 1st March and we can start to ease our gardening lockdown with the first sowings of the year. I have sorted through the welter of catalogues and now sit with packets of seeds lined up, ready to sow. Unlike previous years, I have not been hasty in getting the growing started. There are no seed trays precariously balanced on windowsills, urging the seedlings to get ahead. Instead of this, I have been busy dismantling the potting shed, building a new one next to the greenhouse to create the new Seedling Centre; a sort of horticultural neonatal hub.

The construction of this new potting shed was long in the planning but surprisingly swift in execution. I spent late nights poring over online images of sheds, studying YouTube videos of fit young men screwing bits of wood together. (That’s middle age for you). I still approach DIY with the confidence of an English Test opener venturing out to bat against the Indian spinners: I know what I should be doing, but simply can’t predict what challenge each task might present until I am in the middle of the job and there is no going back.

So, I was surprised by the relative ease with which we managed to put the shed together. I say ‘we’ because, like so many things in my life, I could not have done it without Mrs B. She was there to hold up the sides while I screwed them together, all the time providing observations like “the rats will like it under there” or “I am still worried that it will get wet down the back, against the wall” (the one place this shed will not actually get wet – because of the wall against which it is being built). But we managed to get it done in a couple or three days without falling out.

I have not always kept my temper around sheds. Back at the Old House when trying to locate some sports equipment in the “PE Shed”, my patience was ebbing as I struggled to extricate bags of hockeys sticks from beneath poorly stored tennis rackets. My patience evaporated in a cloud of expletives when a large plastic dog bed, that had been precariously stored on a beam, fell squarely onto my head. My cry of pain and retaliatory kick at the wall alerted my young children, who approached with caution. But any concern for their father disappeared when they saw my foot appear through the shed wall and remain there, stuck in the fractured ship-lap while their incandescent father continued to swear. For years thereafter, the merest mention of The Curious Incident of the Dog Bed in the Shed Time would reduce my children to hysterical laughters.

So, although I have not always found sanctuary in structural shiplap, the new potting shed gives me a glimpse of heaven and I feel a new dawn breaking in the Midlife Garden.

This weekend Mrs B and I took part in the Big Garden Birdwatch a kind of informal National Census of Birds organised by the RSPB in order to produce its annual avian Domesday Book. Although the BGB has been going for over 40 years, 2021 marks the first time we have been organised enough to contribute.

The idea is simple enough: at some point between 29th and 31st January, we simply had to sit down and spend an hour staring out at the garden identifying any birds that alighted on our estate. To take part you did not actually need a BIG garden. Any size would do, and the information pack supplied pictures of typical garden birds one could expect to see. So, before setting our timer we took a look at the list – eighteen different species ranging from blackbird to wood pigeon, coal tit to collared dove and Greenfinch to Great tit. These were all birds that we see regularly in the garden – with the possible exception of collared doves. And, to be fair, we have only seen greenfinches hereabouts in the late summer, feasting on the borage seeds. But in addition to the chosen dirty dozen and a half, we knew that we were likely to see wrens, woodpeckers and wagtails which, for some reason, had not made it onto the idiots’ guide to garden birds. So we were all set for our three score minutes’ worth of Midlife Garden feathered feeding frenzy.

At this point, I need to clarify that it is, merely, a survey. It’s not a competition. There is no reward for spotting the most birds – in contrast to the sponsored birdwatch I did as a callow youth at Chew Valley Lake on the Mendips. Myself and an even more geeky school chum, had lulled potential sponsors into a false sense of security, telling them we might see ten or so species of duck on the lake, thus bumping up our price-per species sponsorship. Come the day, as well as numerous waterfowl, we included every bird we spotted on the one hour round trip there and back, notching up an absurd number of different feathered friends, to then fleece the unsuspecting donors. I reckon we probably included roadkill as a bona fide spot. But I recall it was all in a good cause.

So, no: the Big Garden Birdwatch is not a competition, and yet we were keen for our garden to show the numbers that would represent its worth to the natural world. To prepare for the day I had replenished the peanuts in the feeders and had been to the farmshop and stood for twenty minutes, risking the pandemic, agonising over which fat ball / fat bar / seed type would attract the broadest range of birds.

We laid out the feast and sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It seems the birds got stage fright. As soon as the clock was running, so were they. Or flying – anywhere, except into our garden. After ten minutes, we nearly knocked over our coffee mugs when a wren emerged from the undergrowth. And when not one, but two blue tits fleetingly landed on the nuts, we felt the dam was about to break. But it didn’t. By the end we had a meagre total of seven species. We were left to ponder where were the robins? The coal tits? The STARLINGS FOR F%$KS SAKE! Like Man United’s forward line, they were here one day, AWOL the next. We had to resort to including a starling that landed on the fence as being in the garden. (It was clear on VAR: it had a tail feather over the line).

Of course, there is always the temptation to complete the survey on what could have been, rather than what was. But, like a golfer with a dodgy lie, it all relies on the honesty of the participants, and where is the satisfaction in not playing by the rules? We don’t want to be the twitching equivalent of Patrick Reid.

There is irony in the fact that, for some reason beyond rational thought, these days we associate sightings of robins with Josh. It would be no surprise if Josh was having a laugh at his parents’ expense by warding off the robins that would normally strut around the the garden with brazen confidence. He would be chuckling at our despair over the relative dirth of birds.

Of course, the next day, they were all back, like it was Camp Granada. Popping over from Dave and Yvonne’s next door, there was no sign of the performance anxiety of the previous day as they dug into the nuts, fat and seeds. Long tailed tits flocking in, robins and chaffinches everywhere, more tits than you could wave a big stick at. Today I even saw the lone grey wagtail that always brightens my day. The pictures below are proof of the abundance of Midlife Garden Birdlife, so if the RSPB report a decline in garden birds, we will know better.

Shorter days and longer lockdowns means more time spent on the internet, resulting in some interesting shopping results for the Midlife Garden. Anticipation of the next DPD or Hermes delivery is what is getting us through this pandemic. Even better if purchases from the interweb can supporting our horticultural efforts, so I put together my own WWW: Water Butts, Wheelbarrow wheels and Worms..

First up, my two 700 litre water butts, which are delivered before Christmas on a very large lorry. Gary, our neighbour, is scratching his head trying to work out what they were. As I plant the installation, I realise I need a large drill bit to connect them to the downpipe. Back in the day, when I was first delivering posts as the Midlife Gardener, I would have been able to rummage in The Old Man’s workshed for the requisite part, but today I have to borrow off Gary. He is ex-navy (like TOM) and his workshop is like an F1 pit compared to mine, which looks as well ordered as a pharaoh’s tomb – after the tomb robbers have left.

Gary is happy to oblige, grateful that I have satisfied his curiosity on the nature of the large green items, but he can only find a 15mm drill piece. My instruction sheet states 17mm so I say I can probably ‘make do’ with this one (bodge is the word that hovers in my mind). Gary looks concerned: two mil is a lot he says – so I nod knowingly and agree, realising my rooky error. He finds the correct size in amongst his third full set of gleaming drill bits and I take it gratefully. I still feel like a child playing grown-up games, when it comes to DIY.

Before I can move the butts, I have to change the wheel on the wheelbarrow, which is flatter than one of Lewis Hamilton’s supersofts after full race distance. Any more F1 analogies on pit stops end there, as I employ a hack saw to remove and replace the axle. The new tyre is the hardest of “hards”: a tyre that the website assured me was puncture proof, which is no surprise as it feels like it is made of iron. As I bump across the patio, I am struggling to detect the “honeycomb” structure they told me about, but at least I will not be needing any pit stops for pyracantha-induced punctures.

Remarkably, I set up the water butt with little or no problem – much to Mrs B’s surprise. No double-sawn pipes, broken tanks or major self-inflicted injury, and the little boy in me is chuffed at my apparent competence.

The third of my triad of garden purchases comes as a result of my lockdown rock and roll lifestyle, reading reviews in Gardeners World magazine. It is a wormery – which arrives complete with trays, bedding, a bag of worms, and even some food to get the little wrigglers started. A wormery seems an excellent way to recycle the food waste: they just gobble it up apparently. Though not immediately. The instructions tell me that the worms need time to settle in (perhaps they get travel sick?), and so for the first couple of weeks I am supposed to feed them the granular stuff they came with, give them shredded newspaper to ward of the cold, and check on them regularly to make sure none are making a bolt for freedom, like a bunch of ‘homing worms’.

Honestly – they’re just worms, aren’t they? But these are not your ordinary earth worms: these are TIGER worms. They will soon be munching their way through the foodwaste, producing good compost out the bottom (literally) and making more little worms. So, with my big butts, we will be recycling food and water to reduce our carbon footprint and improve our green credentials.

As Wilson Sports used to say: The Right Equipment Makes the Difference”. If they’re right we will be smashing it when spring comes around.

We are past the winter solstice and the days will start to lengthen. It is a time to once again look forward, rather than dwell on the present (poor pun, but apt in the case of our reduced, lockdown Christmas).

But one of the benefits of gardening is that it draws you forward, planning and looking ahead to the sunnier times and days of plenty. Even in the cold weather there are warming sights of plants coming through with the promise of spring. Despite being deposited in the sodden clay soil, all the garlic and most of the shallots are rising out of the waterlogged ground like excalibur from the lake. The broad beans, too, are emerging and in the pots by the patio the hastily planted bulbs are doing what is expected of them.

The reduction in festive socialising seems to have led to an increase in quizzes and puzzles which might explain why some of you tried so hard to identify the Chili Peppers songs in the previous post. I am pleased to publish the answers below. I am expecting some VAR-type controversy, particularly as my most competitive brother got involved, so I look forward to the hairline debates over re-mixes, cover versions and whether it was fair to include titles and photo captions in the list of songs.

For the record, Red Hot Chili Peppers were probably Josh’s favourite band, which was my reason for the theme. When he and his mates saw them some years ago, they had initially been disappointed when ‘Soul to Squeeze’ had not been on the playlist…until the encore when the guitar intro found the 6 ft 4 inch Josh suddenly catapulting himself onto the shoulders of 5ft 8 inch Ed, where he stayed for the rest of the track. It’s an image that I held in my head as I wrote it and I am playing the track on loop as I write this.

“Where I go, I just don’t know
I got to, got to, gotta take it slow
When I find my peace of mind
I’m gonna give ya some of my good time”

Happy New Year to you all – find your peace of mind and look to the good times.

36 Red Hot Chili Peppers Songs

Post Title:

1. One Hot Minute
2. Soul to Squeeze

Text:

1. Hey
2. This is the place
3. Desecration Smile
4. Easily
5. She looks to me
6. Otherside
7. By the Way
8. If
9. Storm in a teacup
10. A minor thing
11. Midnight
12. Around the world
13. Road trippin’
14. This Velvet Glove
15. Purple Stain.
16. My Friends
17. Coffee shop
18. Dosed
19. Right on time
20. Turn it again
21. Readymade
22. Transcending
23. Warm tape
24. Deep kick
25. Scar tissue
26. Tearjerker
27. Walkabout
28. We believe

Photos:

1. Dark Necessities
2. They’re Red Hot
3. Under the Bridge
4. Fire
5. We Turn Red
6. Make You Feel Better

“Hey”. It’s Mrs B. We are in the kitchen. She says to me “This is the place I was hoping to prepare dinner”. She has that Desecration Smile (whatever that is) as she looks at what is easily my best ever crop of Red Hot Chilis. She looks to me and then the otherside of the room where a potted plant with small yellow chillies sits on the windowsill. “And by the Way, if you think that plant is staying in here, think again”

The debate is no more than a storm in a teacup. I agree to move the plant, a minor thing, and promise to process the chillies, although I fear it will take till midnight. As usual, I have grown several different varieties of chilli from around the world. To view the plants in the greenhouse was to go road trippin’ through south America and beyond from the brown Machu Pichu to the jewel-like Naga Yellow Blaze. I wonder if I should wear some PPE when chopping and cooking the chillies. I look around – “perhaps this velvet glove” I muse to myself but worry the combination of the brown and red chillies will only leave a purple stain. I decide to risk working without it.

First, chilli jam. We have finished last year’s batch. I gave a lot of it as gifts to my friends and relatives. In a matter of moments the aroma in the kitchen changes from coffee shop to sour smelling distillery, as the vinegar and sugar simmer. I have dosed the sugar with pectin but fail to stir it in properly, so it creates a nasty sludge. I pay for this later when, despite being right on time with the boiling of the jam mixture it refuses to set. I turn it again but finally give in and elect to market the new produce as ‘extra thick chilli sauce’.

I still have plenty of chillies left over and decide to try out my new oven – a readymade chilli dryer. The results are spectacular, transcending even my highest hopes. Some of the chillies had seemed a little low on heat, warm tape in comparison with the fearsome fire I had expected. But when I try the dried versions they have a deep kick that could leave scar tissue on gums and tongues. I chop the Machu Pichu to make chilli flakes. The rest I decide to make into chilli powder and process the dried chillies in an old coffee grinder. Removing the lid releases a fine dust cloud that is a real tearjerker. I go walkabout on the patio till the air clears a little.

But, ultimately, I am pleased with the final products. Mrs B sets up the produce on a tray for the Insta post. We believe the results justify the efforts .

A FREE JAR OF CHILLI JAM-SAUCE TO THE FIRST CORRECT ENTRY NAMING ALL RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS SONGS MENTIONED IN THIS POST.