Day 3 of the 100 day project

Here we are, got to day 3!  Today the snow has all gone and the sun is shining.  It is bright but it is also cold.  Still coughing and spluttering I decided that I must be able to do something today.  Ian has been working on repairing the raised beds so I had to go out to look at that and admire it.  The beds have been falling apart for a while and it is amazing to see at least one of them looking like it is meant again!  It is not so noticeable in the summer when the beds are full but in the winter the collapsed corners and the gaps in the sides have been very visible.  I might post some pictures when he is finished although it seems a little like cheating to pinch his achievements instead of accomplishing something of my own!

There is a ring of tiny daffodils in the kitchen garden.  When they were planted years ago there was a pear tree in the centre but pears don't really like it up here.  Apples are very happy and we have huge apple crops every year but the pear trees, two of them planted by our predecessors, sulked and never thrived.  I had the image of a huge pear tree in blossom like a ship in full sail.  You see them sometimes when you are driving in Herefordshire and they are a wonderful sight.  After nine or ten years of nothing much and no response to our attempts to give them a bit of extra care in the form of cleared grass and mulching we got rid of them.  That is one of the ways I have changed as I have got older I think.  I used to struggle with saying goodbye to any plant at all and would attempt to keep the saddest of specimens going.  Twelve years or more up here have gradually made me realise that some things grow and thrive: apples, amelanchier, dogwoods, damsons.  Some things do not and these days I say goodbye to them.

So what did I do on day 3 of the 100 day project?  Not much if I am honest.  I have two wormwood bushes near the wooden greenhouse.  Wormwood is also know as Artemisia absinthum or the common name of mugwort (sounds a bit Harry Potterish to me).    I don't use this in the herb garden at all.  It is a byword for bitterness and in the middle ages was used to treat dyspepsia.  I can only imagine that it was so bitter that you might claim to be cured to stop your herbalist giving you any more.  But it does have a beautiful, dense feathery foliage and grows in the poorest soils.  When you brush past it in the sun it smells of sunbleached hillsides in the Mediterranean, with just that faint undertone of bitterness, like cat pee.   I can imagine some people might dislike it but I love the silvery green and the featheriness of it.   I only managed to cut back one of the bushes before I ran out of steam but that is the point of the 100 day project: doing something, however small.  I put the prunings on the outside fire to burn and came back inside.  I can't even tick it off my five things list from yesterday as I have only done half the job but never mind, I have done something.

And now the sun has gone in.  There was frogspawn in the pond as well as the tiny daffodils.  Spring is out there somewhere.