sticks and string

It's time to get supports in for all my tall heritage veggies, (shortness has been bred into modern varieties to make them easier to manage).  These 'Champion of England' peas will easily get to 2 metres - so although these might look like the most optimistic pea sticks in the world, they'll be fully covered in a few weeks. They need to be strong enough to hold the weight of the crop without keeling over at the crucial moment. I kept lots of nice sturdy bits of hazel from the hedge I laid back in January - perfect for the job and I love how they look. Plenty of twiggy bits for the peas to wrap their little tendrils around as they sprint skywards.

On Monday I found myself short of a few sticks to finish the supports for my broad beans. Now I wouldn't normally disappear up the woods on a busy bank holiday (honest boss if you're reading this), but the siren call of an hour's peace among the trees was hard to resist. So I took some loppers and set off to cut some ash poles.

Here they are in situ with cats cradle string.

The beans on the right are a month ahead.

I'm going to learn to make string out of nettles to help build our new Celtic village.

That's exciting (if you're me).

My arms are covered in nettle rash from pulling them out of the hedges.

Might as well make use of the little buggers - too tough to eat now, so string it is...

the world turns

It's been a big few weeks here at Asparagus Towers. My eldest stepson left the nest, so we have a couple of months to strip the room out and redecorate, before his little brother finishes uni and takes up residence there. Big brother got the big room when we moved, because he was just about to graduate and wanted to come home for a bit. Now the wheel has turned and he's flown off to Southern Europe, so it seems right that little bro should be given the same options.

This has prompted something of a cleaning frenzy on my part - sorting through clothes, washing woolies, scrubbing and waxing floors like something out of Downton Abbey. I'm not normally prone to feverish levels of housework - I like to maintain basic food hygiene standards in the kitchen, but other than that I favour what I would regard as a normal level of sluttishness on the domestic front. But somehow this feels like the right time to refresh things.

So with a nod to Martha Stewart, I would like to show you a couple of shots of the hall floor!?!

As you can see from the panel on the left, normal mopping has always left it looking pretty grubby.

Four months of buliders in the house had only made matters worse. 

The panel on the right has been scrubbed with a paste of bio laundry detergent...

The dirt just floats right on out! 

(Should have flipped this pic so the clean/dirty sides were the same way round -

 that's what Martha would have done!)

I think it was the plumber at the old house who gave me this tip.

Other reasons to be cheerful this week include:

New christmas slippers - finally chose these after a couple of false starts.

 Now I can go out to the compost bin and wood shed to get logs,

(my old ones did not have an outdoor sole).

 I may have to take up yodelling though.

The new study is taking shape - oh, and what's that on the door?

My name! 

I'm claiming this space mostly for me, to write and think, and have books and craft stuff.

 Mr A-P did tentatively suggest that the kitchen and laundry could be mine, 

but we soon agreed they were for all of us!

I finished the hedge I was laying at work…

It's about 30m long and I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

All the hazel catkins that were way up in the air, are now down where you can see them

- dancing in the sunlight on a January morning.

iron age connections

It's January and I'm hedge laying again - different garden to last year. Then, I was tucked away from the public gaze, this time I'm slap bang in the middle of the museum, where the world and his wife and their dog walk by on their way around and back. I'm still not producing the most classically beautiful laid hedge - but I'm confident enough to have a go and be judged, (and goodness me does everyone have an opinion about the hedges. Who knew!?!).

work in progress

On Wednesday the museum was closed for an all-staff training day. The afternoon was a chance to do taster sessions with other departments, and one of my choices was 'iron age tools'. We're having a new iron age Celtic village - how's that for an oxymoron? It will be a reconstruction of a site in Anglesey called Bryn Eryr (hill of eagles). Our blacksmith has made replicas of all the iron age wood-working tools that we have in the collection - the idea is to try and extrapolate what kind of wooden objects might have populated the dwellings by looking at the tools. Hardly any wooden objects survive from this period - some notable exceptions were found in waterlogged ground at the Glastonbury Lake Village site in the Somerset Levels. As I looked at a well thumbed photocopy of an image* of the finds I knew I was looking at the contents of my wheelbarrow from the day before.

The saw even has the teeth set to only cut on the pull stroke - exactly like my pruning saw.

If I had a really strong arm, I could throw a stone across the Bristol Channel and hit the spot where these tools were found. It's a weird feeling to be so separated from these people by time, but so intimately connected by the work of our hands. I'm not suggesting they were hedge laying - the great push to enclose the land was much later, but this is surely evidence of a people managing their landscape in a way that I would recognise.

*Had trouble finding an image credit for this but I think it's from the original photo record of the excavation - and it's reproduced here

billhooks and brash

The hedge at the bottom of the orchard has been getting a bit out of hand over the last few years, so this winter I decided to lay it.  Forgot to take any ‘before’ pictures, but it was looking a lot like this…

And now it looks like this……

For any purists out there, I realise it’s not the most stylish piece of hedge laying in the world, but it is hedge laying - and I did it by myself.  You wallop your way through each stem almost all the way, leaving just a thin strip of living material that’s flexible enough to bend the whole thing over. Every metre or so you cut a few stems tall as living stakes and then weave the other stuff into and around them. Doing a whole hedge like this creates a dense stock proof barrier - the plan is to graze sheep in the orchard this year. It’s also a great resource for wildlife.

The traditional weapon of choice for this job is a billhook.  There’s something fantastically empowering and ‘don’t mess with me’ about slashing your way through a hedge with a billhook.  I would recommend it to anyone – especially since my idea of ‘women’s chainsaw group’ fell on pretty stony ground. It’s particularly gratifying as it’s almost exactly a year since I had carpal tunnel surgery on both my wrists, so it’s great to feel strong again.  I can’t believe that in less than 12 months I’ve gone from feeling like someone had swapped my hands for a pair of tiny kittens, to thinking ‘Hmm – must go lay that hedge’.  Proves there’s light at the end of the (carpal) tunnel.

The hedge is mixed native species, mostly hawthorn and hazel, so as a by-product I’ve ended up with a lovely big pile of hazel ‘brash’.  This will make fantastic pea sticks, but it's handy for all sorts of things in the meantime, like keeping the pesky woodpigeons off my brassicas.

Here is everything you could wish to know about hedge laying.  When it’s done well they are truly beautiful, and this is the perfect time of year to appreciate the craft when you’re out and about in the British countryside. There are all kinds of different regional styles to spot if you’re a big nerd like me.  As you can see from my pictures I favour the ‘make it up out of your own head’ style….