Get some wee helping hands
CHILDREN love pottering around a garden and my six-year-old is no exception.
Give him a trowel and he’ll dig halfway to Australia and he’s become quite an expert at uprooting thistles.
He can rhyme off a list of flowers that are safe to eat and he likes anything that’s got a nice smell.
What he’s not so hot on is identifying which tasks are appropriate to the season, so when he began asking to plant seeds I launched into an explanation about how this was the wrong time of the year.
He wasn’t having any of that nonsense, so in the end I gave him a bag of compost, a large pot and packet of peas – and let him get on with it.
Peas are perfect for small gardeners as they are big and easy to handle and they also germinate rapidly, so once they were planted we placed the pot in a warm spot by the front door where it was inspected daily for signs of activity.
A week past Friday, the first shoots appeared, and growth has been rapid since then.
We won’t get peas, but we should eventually have enough fresh shoots to make a salad, which will give my small assistant a warm glow of achievement.
He’s not alone in favouring fast results. I’m quite partial to a quick fix too so, when I found myself short of time for weeding an overgrown border, I made a pass down its entire length, pulling out anything that would come up easily.
In the space of 10 minutes I’d consigned a big pile of annual weeds to the compost heap and the border, although by no means weed-free, was looking a lot more respectable than it had just a short time earlier.
I know that it pays to do a job properly, but in gardening as in other areas of life, sometimes the important thing is to keep all
the plates spinning and hope that nothing falls through the cracks.
Recently, however, I uncovered a grim example of what happens when things get neglected.
A Japanese quince, which in spring I had dug up and planted temporarily in a large pot while I dithered about where it should go, had been languishing at the very bottom of the garden, hidden by the rampant growth of a nearby Cirsum.
When I found it again the leaves were brown and crispy and the whole plant looked dead.
This time though my sloppy habits were the saving of it because instead of putting the whole thing directly into the compost heap, where it clearly belonged, I just propped it against the fence beside all the other temporary container residents, and that evening I watered the lot of them.
The result is that the quince has come back from the dead, with fresh, young leaves breaking on all of the branches.
This time round I was taking no chances, so instead of putting off the job, I planted it directly into the ground where warm soil and autumn rains will give it the best chance of making a full recovery.