I've been taking a very hands on approach with the garden lately, and it's working out - I have a couple of arches of jasmine (dead easy) and this year I've made an arch out of flowering nasturtiums (very tasty). It's possible that I may be able to sell some of the mint I've grown to the local pub for their Pimms jugs this summer, and there's still plenty of time for a second harvest
Anyway, the brambles I've been growing as a burgalar deterrent (and source of blackberries) were seriously listing over and blocking out the sunlight over my mint harvest and the lavender that Mr. & Mrs. sprunkner got me, so I figured I had to do something about them. So I put on the old ski gloves I found under my bed when I moved in and went about tackling the beast with a hammer and some of those cable nails, because when dealing with brambles, reinforced ski gloves are about the best thing to be wearing on your hands.
Sadly ski gloves are about the worst thing to be wearing when holding nails against a fence. It's impossible. You hold onto them but you can't hold it tight enough against the fence to make any meaningful contact so the hammer just bounces off and the cable nail thing just slips out of your clumsy gloved hand and you lose it in a sea of mint and brambles. I tried Plan B, which involved taking the glove off my left hand, and then after a certain amount of thought, my right as well, because there was really no need to be wearing a glove on the hand that was holding the hammer, and went in bare-handed.
And I got a few scars from off of it, but goddammit if I didn't nail that plant to the fence. I did slip once with the hammer and accidentally hit the stem, but brambles are pretty tough, I figured. And of course I may have put a couple of the nails through its leaves, and most of its leaves were now facing the wrong way, and I wasn't even sure that it would get enough sunlight (at this point, a dead bramble that had been oucompeted for sunlight by the creeper that is now taller than my building was glaringly obvious to my left) but nevertheless I figured if a job is worth doing it's worth doing properly. And badly if necessary.
It hurt quite a lot. Quite a lot of swearing, too. And then the nagging doubt that I'd killed the plant as well, which is something I've kind of gotten used to over these past few years. I've killed a lot of plants - most of them intentionally because they were weeds which raises a whole different set of ethics - but others simply because I planted them in the wrong place, or I tried to make them grow in a way that they were never supposed to.
A couple of weeks later, and the leaves that were the wrong way round have turned to face the sun. There are more flowers than I can count, and they are attracting lots of bees to the garden. I'm even considering a second set of nails to hold the bits that have grown since the first lot, though that might have to wait until I get back from Glastonbury
The nasturtium leaves have arrtracted colonies of aphids which are in turn supporting flourishing colonies of ladybird larvae, some of which are now starting to metamorphose. Also, the missus made me plant a parsnip which was starting to grow in the cupboard, and it's doing well.So, I nailed a plant to a fence. What's the manliest piece of gardening you've done recently?
