what a busy boy....

What a busy boy I’ve been today! We’ve had one of those lovely winter days with blue sky, sunshine and no wind - perfect for getting things done in the garden. I started this morning by cutting down one of the apple trees. It was a sad, mis-shapen thing and never bore more than a handful of fruit. It was an early variety and probably quite unsuited to growing this far north so I’ll put something more appropriate in its place.  The smaller twigs will go through the shredder and the bigger stuff will go on the fire after drying for a year or so.

Next job was to empty one of the compost ‘daleks’. It had some lovely crumbly stuff in it which, after bagging, has given me about 140 litres of humus-rich goodness for the container grown veg. I still have the other dalek and a big open heap to dig into and then there’s the leaf mould frame and about 400 litres of fine sieved compost bagged up from last year. My dream of compost self-sufficiency is finally realized!!

Decanted three gallons of seaweed tea from a big drum into smaller bottles. It doesn’t half stink when you stir it up. The rotted seaweed will be composted then I’ll get another lot under way. Six gallons should see me through the season but I can always make more if I have to.

Pottered about and did some general tidying up before the last job of the day which was severing a layered blackcurrant branch from its parent and moving to a prepared hole. The layering method is probably the easiest way to propagate currants and you get a bush much faster than from a cutting.

the layered shoot still attached to parent

removed from parent and with a healthy root ball ready to go into prepared hole

I pegged this one down last spring and after less than a year I have a well-rooted bush with half a dozen good branches.