THE poem that I featured in this column way back in June 21’ said:
“SPRING is here, it’s hard to do the gardening, it’s hard to dig the dirt, to pull out all the weeds by hand, the fingers they do hurt”.
The facts are it is hard to keep a garden looking good, I’m a stickler for having a vege garden looking good at all times.
That is, a full amount of soil right to the top of an above ground garden, a spread of sugar cane mulch to cool the soil and trap the water and any old leaves or plants pulled out or cut back and a garden without weeds.
I like a ‘ show ‘ garden, one that looks good from afar.
But how many of us just plant for the sake of planting something.
Do we plant in season? Did we learn from our past mistakes and failures?
Do we find out why a certain crop didn’t turn out, did we let them struggle without much water. There are so many variables.
My wife loves jig saw puzzles and will spend a lot of time working out which piece fits where. Gardeners, or should I say those that love their garden, should spend some time working out the solutions as to why their crop was not as good as last time.
Spring is here, the days are warming up, that circadian clock (we talked about a couple of weeks ago) is starting to tick.
Time to start planting those veges you want to grow for your family.
If you’re getting on in years, maybe ‘The knees they hurt, your back is sore, you get dizzy when you stand’.
There comes a time in our lives when things get too hard.
We finally have to admit that we don’t have that oomph that we once had.
Time to think of solutions to our problem, raised gardens, just vine-type vegetables, flowers maybe, or shrubs, or even herbs.
When we were younger, we had no trouble bending, kneeling, or balancing to do a couple of jobs at once.
Now, maybe it is getting a little hard, time to think how your gardening skills can be finely tuned to suit you.
Maybe assistance from a battery-operated garden implement, secateurs, saw, blower, mower or raise your garden to suit your height.
Someone told me once that using a lot of mushroom compost was not good for the plants, however, maybe it was just the type of plants I planted, but I found that they did really well in this medium.
And as mentioned in this column previously, don’t underestimate the value of any of the ‘ POOS’, be they horse, cow, chicken or other.
However, when fresh, keep it away from the plant itself in case it burns the delicate stem. Your plants take the nutrients out of the soil, and this needs replenishing from time to time, and just because we want to fill a space, we put in a bag of ‘soil ‘.
Because it’s marked, soil. However, I find that a different bag of soil mix, (cow, mushroom, chicken,) every time you add to the garden gives the plants a new zing and gets them growing, and don’t forget the mulch.
Till next time.
