sciatica – Garden Gate Flowers

When my parents were developing the garden and working it up to produce vegetables on an industrial scale they used to start to plan their holidays around the seasons in the garden so that they would not be away when any particular veg was likely to be cropping, resulting in several tons of valuable fodder going to waste.

This is a state of mind that I have so far tried to avoid – with spectacular results if last year was anything to go by, as I spent most of July and August abroad, and the garden did its best to return to wilderness in my absence.

I did not learn my lesson this year: at the start of July we decided to jet off to Cyprus – to the villa owned by my favourite brother-in-law. The mangetout and sugar snap peas were peaking and by the time we returned the brief season was over apart from some very bumpy mangetout in amongst the weeds. But I am pleased to say that my attempt at succession planting seems to have, well, succeeded so the later wave has enabled us to harvest plenty of peas over the last week or two. By now though, they are beginning to gain the size and consistency of marbles.

Other stuff has happened to be ready to harvest while we were around, such as the shallots and garlic. The shallots are fab and some of the garlic has been awesome – such as the Early Purple Wight and the Elephant Garlic. The Lautrec Wight gave us smaller bulbs, but that might be something to do with it being a hard neck variety.

I have also gathered my onions in as the tops of some of them had “fallen” over so I thought I’d dig them all up. That might have been a trifle premature, but as the whole onion patch (along with the rest of the veg patch) was totally overrun with mature weeds, it was a bit difficult to to find the onions, let alone get an accurate estimate of their maturity. I’m letting them dry a little before I store them.

On the upside, as they say stateside, ten days in Cyprus appears to have been the miracle cure for my back. I still don’t know the extent of the damage as I had an MRI on 16th July but am still awaiting the results. But at least my vertebral column no longer feels as precarious as the piles of crockery in the Sword in the Stone kitchen scene so I have set to and cleared much of the undergrowth. I now have plenty of fresh soil to cultivate. I can get back to the fun stuff now, planting and all that. The leeks have gone in (finally – don’t know how they survived so long in a seed tray) and we will get some biannual flowers sorted too. But there does suddenly seem to be a lot of spare garden and I have an overwhelming urge to plant.

So with a wave of the gardening wand…Higitus, Figitus…

Back in mid June I suffered the ultimate gardening injury – a slipped disc. Well, strictly speaking I understand it to be a herniated disc. I wasn’t even gardening – I had simply been doing some house work in the flat, leaned across a table to straighten a piece of paper on the mantle piece and it felt like a piece of my back simply tore. It was agony, though the next day it was not the back that hurt as much as my leg which felt like it had been hit repeatedly with a rounders bat. I never realised this was what sciatica felt like.

So I was off gardening duties, but the same week the annual open day for Galhampton gardens took place. We paid our monies and took our choice of the horticultural delights that the villagers wanted to display. It was an interesting meander through gardens which ranged from little more than one herbaceous border and a lot of grass to others that had every last square centimetre prepped and planted with complimentary veg and flowers. Others were open seemingly just to display their birds or their model railway. It was an eclectic mix.

The one recurring theme that seemed to cause angst with Mrs B was the size of most people’s tomatoes. Paddi’s already had good-sized fruit in June, while ours were only just ready to planted out, and other gardeners were seemingly about harvest a bumper crop when we made our grand tour. Beware gardening envy – it is the green fingered monster that doth mock the peat on which it feeds. Covetousness enveloped us as we viewed other tomatoes and devoured our horticultural self-respect as we ambled through in the warm June sunshine.

But when we got back to the garden we realised (or rather Mrs B accepted) that there were still plenty of good things in our patch that commended our piece of ground to us. Like the mature trees such as the amelanchier and the bean tree, or the established herbaceous borders that we love so much or the more recent extension to the boomerang bed which we were hoping would come up strong with a range of perennials

Husband and wife back together again – with a tentative hug of unity (careful with the back dear).