A day of farewells

...some sad, some less so!

Vicky

After my suspicions were aroused by Grandma last Tuesday, I had a closer inspection of our 'Vicky' the young Victoria plum tree.  (Here she is in a slightly more optimistic photo from an earlier post).  Sadly it does look very much as if she is no longer with us - especially as lower down the trunk the bark has been eaten away in 2 places low down by almost 50% of the way round.  I can't imagine such a young tree could possibly survive such an injury?  And what did it - rabbits?  Bit low for deer I think, and I don't know if deer have ever been sighted in the garden here.  But this finding definitely is a warning that any newly planted trees in future will need proper protective cages.

Which of course started me thinking about new fruit trees to add to the orchard - completely new things? Perhaps a quince,  a crab apple, a damson?  Supposed to be good as a windbreak...Worthwhile remembering also to perhaps plant replacements for those trees which look a bit vulnerable, and which I would miss - the greengage, another eating apple?  Obviously now a replacement Victoria will be on the list. Its a terrible shame, Vicky was herself the replacement for the excellent cropping mature Victoria which went in a storm a few years ago.  Despite losing a couple of good branches because Grandma didn't remove the fruit when they weren't strong enough to hold the weight, she would have been just settling in to put on some proper growth this year.  Oh well.  Nose back into Bob Flowerdew's Complete Fruit Book for pondering time...

Onward to the more welcome farewells:

Hurray! The manky old fence panels are off!  Unfortunately we had to give the jasmine a rather extreme haircut as it was totally entwined around both the top trellis bit and through the actual panels themselves.  I tried a less drastic prune first, to leave a head height column of twisted woody trunks, but once the panels were off, it was leaning very worryingly without it's anchorage in the trellis.  So off it came to about 3 feet....it's a mature beast, and in my experience from the old garden, it takes a darn sight more than a heavy prune to kill a jasmine!  I shall have to put some thought towards what to support it with in the future, though, otherwise it will just sprawl crazily across all the plants in the border and smother them.

There were a couple of dainter climbing characters which were attached to the panels by means of plastic mesh - we have propped them up temporarily on bamboo canes for now, but I think a few obelisks or tepees will do the job more permanently for them quite easily.

In this picture you can see that we had to leave one of the corner panels in situ for a few more days, this is because it is supporting a lovely mature honeysuckle which I am loathe to lose, it's not in desperate need of a dramatic 'maintenance' prune unlike the jasmine, so it would be a shame to lose its flowers this year.  However, I need time to think about how best it could be supported...

But as soon as the first few panels were gone, the change of atmosphere within the veg patch was magical! Suddenly the slightly claustrophobic feeling was gone, and the increase in light was amazing - certainly light was being lost in the morning, and hopefully the increase in ventilation especially in the shadiest section should help in drying up the damper, slimier areas at least a bit.

Forecast for tomorrow not really looking conducive to pottering in the garden, but certainly after that I hope to press on with the weeding in these newly exposed areas so that when A gets home from work and continues to nibble away at the rabbit fencing, he can trench along cleaner ground which should help the job go faster.

I also had the benefit of a little helper for some of my gardening time today:

Freshly returned from rugby (muddy knees were already in evidence, so I saw no problem with continuing the job), he was keen to plant out 'his' strawberries in his little patch...here he is adding that all important label so that I don't forget the variety.  We chose a late fruiter: 'Rhapsody', in the optimism that we might get some fruit this year (or someone will be exceedingly disappointed and go off gardening completely if you have to wait too long for results!).  My cunning plan is to acquire 4 early and 4 mid season fruiting variety plants later in the summer to plant at the 'normal' strawberry planting time in July to establish ready for next summer, so we could have a longer season of home-harvested strawberries instead of all in one go.  The best laid plans of mice and men...