New moon, new broom

At 4.44pm on Wednesday the 13^th, the moon was new. I know this because of our moon calendar.

I get one every year by post from Mystery Arts in Brighton. It’s lovely to look at and, as well as keeping us up to date with what the moon is doing and telling us about eclipses and astrological signs, it helps me with my veg garden. I sew and plant out when the moon is new and waxing. This does make a difference. They’ve proved it on ‘Gardeners’ World’! (For more on this fascinating subject, you could do worse than investigate ‘biodynamic agriculture’.)

 
And if the moon affects plants, it might also affect us, which might account for my recent flurry of cleaning and gardening. Other factors of course are the new year, the lockdown, a few fine days and the fact that I don’t have a big writing project on at the moment (for various reasons which I might go into another time) and so am twiddling my thumbs looking for things to do.
 
First up (as they say) was my workroom. I can’t remember when I last cleaned it and the floor was beginning to scrunch underfoot with a mixture of shredded paper, sewing debris and dead flies.

Dust covered the surfaces.

Ropes of cobwebs decorated the ceiling.

The filing tray overflowed and the storage system under my desk had descended into chaos.

The only neat area was my collection of reference books.

Two bin bags of paper for recycling, several buckets of dirty water, a rattling vacuum cleaner, one visit to the tip and three days later and my room shone with order and cleanliness.

 

Next on the list was the garden. I tore Frog away from the Mini kit car he’s rebuilding (also another story) . . .

Frog's 'Hustler' in 1985 decorated with records for Exeter University Rag Week

 
. . . and we tackled what we call ‘the big bed’, a shrubbery which had become infested with brambles  and grown so tall it obscured our view. (There were no blackberries left so it was a good time to make some changes: we wouldn't be depriving the birds.) Frog wielded chain-saw and bill-hook and I pulled with my new bramble-proof gloves. Two days' work later and we had three large piles on the lawn.

What we do with them now we haven’t yet decided. The birds are loving them, using them as a waiting area for the bird table and investigating them as sources of nest material.

We can now see what we actually have left in the bed and through to slices of our lovely view. . . 

 
We left this leggy mahonia . . .

. . . because the flowers were turning into berries and apparently (I checked) the birds love them. (Humans can eat mahonia berries too, but I’m not sure I’ll try.)

 
Likewise this ivy on a dead apple tree (left).

The spindly trees you can see in the centre of the picture above and in this one below . . .

. . . are elms, which have grown as suckers from a tree which used to live here until it got too tall, contracted Dutch elm disease and died (the beetle which spreads the disease only flying above a certain height). We've since cut their tops off, both so that they survive and in the hope that they will bush out and help fill our now rather sparse shrubbery. I'm all for native species.*

 
I wanted to do this post last weekend for Kate’s blog link-up party on the theme of ‘new’ but it wasn’t ready. Instead I’m doing it in advance for this weekend's (22nd to 24th) on the theme ‘moon’, and sneaking in the ‘newness’ that should have been there last week. Do take a look the party and maybe even upload something of your own - it's very easy.

*I had a feeling elm wasn't native so I checked and here's what I discovered (from various sources). There are two sorts of elm - Wych elm and English elm. Wych elm is the only true native, but grows naturally only in the northern half of the UK. The English elm is thought to have been introduced by Bronze Age people from southern Europe, and this is the version in our garden. I find these elms easy to distinguish from other trees by their ultra-knobbly bark and the strange thickness at the bottom of small branches. (Wych elms on the other hand have smooth bark.)

The ultra-knobbly bark of English elm

The strange branches of English elm