We returned with 178
boxes of books and four truckloads of near to useless furniture which sits in
the barn hoping for a home while I had hours of work ahead to rebuild the
stockpile of aubergines, peppers and tomatoes. That done, I opened some boxes
and my books made me feel a little more at home but the big work remained in the
garden.
After the months of
winter/spring rain that have inundated Bearn, temperatures suddenly leaped and
Mailhos became a jungle. In the one week we were away, nearly every flower
and fruit tree bloomed; every plant grew crazily including grass, vetch,
rye and oats in my vegetable garden. I missed the peonies flowering and just
made it home to see the cherries in all their beauty while the pear, plum and
apple were already beginning to form fruit.
But lets go back to
that mixture of grass, vetch, oats and rye. It stands thickly at a height of
half a metre and on Thursday last, we both knelt down to tackle a bed of two
metres by two by hand and spent two days clearing it. Calculating the size of the garden and my
ambitions for 2013, at such a rate, the garden could be cleared by early
December - just in time for the first frosts....
So we decided to make Lasagne....
Recipe -
You take a very
thickly overgrown patch of impossible, green growth and you cut if down to toe
level.
Gather up the grass and keep it to the side. Take lots of mover’s
cardboard boxes that you have just emptied of books and remove all plastic
tape. Lay these down over the cut grass making sure that each box overlaps the
other so absolutely no light can find its way through.
Water well to flatten
the boxes.
Scatter with a thick layer of grass cuttings until the cardboard is no longer visible.
Pile on a good layer of compost and a few handfuls of horse
manure...
and finish with an icing of sieved wood ash from the fireplace.
Water once again...
and protect with with a thick layer of straw and get going on the next!
Scatter with a thick layer of grass cuttings until the cardboard is no longer visible.
and protect with with a thick layer of straw and get going on the next!