Germination

[bunn]

One week in, I have a definite line of mixed stir fry seedlings, and a slightly less confident looking line of mixed salad.  No spring onions or nasturtians yet. 

Yesterday,  philmophlegmand I did mighty deeds slaying the evil berberis which lurked behind the greenhouse and had damaged its glass panes through its evil infiltration.  We also slew its minions, a hazel, a bramble, and a mightly army of very annoying ivy. 

At least, I hope we've slain the ivy: some of it had climbed up on top of the greenhouse and set up a base where it was impossible to get at, but we have cut its supply routes and hope to starve it out. 

Berberis is a deeply annoying shrub.  I know the flowers are moderately attractive and the birds like the berries, but that could be said of many plants.  Only berberis is covered in long painful thorns that fall off the bush at the slightest provocation, so that anyone that attacks it, or even tries to remove the fallen wood, ends up looking like a pincushion.  We haven't dug the roots out, but ISTR that berberis cannot take very hard pruning.  Here's hoping...

I replaced two of the broken panes with a perspex sheet.  I hope this will do the same job as the glass, but it is so much lighter, easier to cut to size and simpler and less murderous to deal with.  There may be some loss of rigidity of the structure though, I suppose. I intend to build a hazel hurdle fence along that side today, to restore some protection from the wind.

On Friday I had a visit from a wildlife enthusiast, who has Lottery funding to build a web portal for local wildlife data collection and observation.  He was most impressed with my hazel hedges, and felt they looked like a good habitat for dormice!  Glad to say that none of the cats have brought in any dormice as yet.

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I believe there's good eating on a dormouse ;-)

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

That depends on whether it is an edible dormouse or not. Edible dormice are larger than the type most people think of as dormice.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I didn't know there were two different species.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

mighty deeds slaying the evil berberis

Berberis is nice, not evil. Cut it back with shears and it's fine.

We used to have one outside the downstairs toilet window in Telford; it needed cutting back every six months or so, but the pruning just went in the green compost bin or in our compost. We also had a half standard one in the front garden; I was sorry to leave that one behind.

I used to have a berberis outside my bedroom window at my parent's. It is still there, but it needs quite a lot of cutting now as it's quite large.

We are currently berberis-less: we must get another one.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

"Cut it back with shears"

Hmmm. Put it this way, I managed to break bunn's ratchet loppers on Saturday. This wasn't a job that shears could have coped with. Strictly speaking, it was the hazel I was trying to cut through, but it was all bound up together with the other stuff.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I have a suspicion that the berberis may actually have done most of the damage, even though you were working on the hazel when they actually went. Berberis wood is a lot harder than hazel, and I used those loppers on the other berberis by the steps late last year, which was even bigger than the greenhouse one.