Mulch, mulch, and mulch again. Meanwhile I disband the chicken football team

I want to get straight into the gardening in this post as I feel I have been wasting my time on too many chicken based activities. So it’s the height of summer the garden is blooming, let’s get busy.

3rd July 2023. Things I have been doing lately:

Mulching my plants. Mulching is such a wonderful word with tremendous onomatopoeic qualities – everything you need to know is in the name. But at the height of summer mulching comes into its own. At its simplest mulching is covering the soil to retain moisture. Plants are constantly losing moisture through a process called transpiration, whereby they lose moisture through their leaves and stem. This can be partially alleviated by using different types of mulch including: membrane, bark, stone and of course compost. The sun is baking the soil and plants find it difficult to get and retain moisture. By mulching around the plants you stop the sun reaching the soil and stop the plant roots from being baked when they come up looking for water.

If you buy new plants from the garden centre and plant them out now, in most cases you are wasting your time and money. The sun will bake the plants before they can establish themselves. Your only hope is to mulch as you plant. By far and away the best mulch is compost from your own bin, failing this buy some cheap bags of compost from a China shop, these will be ok as you are not using them as a planting medium but as ground cover.

The benefit of having a compost bin is that you will always have compost for planting, and in this case mulching. The photos below show the black gold that comes from my compost bins. Click on each photo for a larger view.

Mulching is very simple:

• Thoroughly water the soil under and around your plants.
• Apply the mulch to about two inches thick around the stems and immediate vecinity of your plant.
• Where you have closely planted borders just spread the mulch lightly, but generously over the top of the plants.
• Finish by once more watering the plants thoroughly and rinsing the mulch through the planted borders.

The first photo below shows me beginning to mulch directly around individual plants. The second shows the process of spreading mulch over closely planted beds before watering in. Finally some of this years sunflowers mulched up. Click on each photo for a larger view.

Success with Sago Palm pups. Regular readers of this blog will remember that some months ago I showed you how to remove and plant up Sago Palm pups. Removing and potting up pups is important for two reasons. Firstly, by removing the pups you restore the symmetry of your plant so that it retains its single stem clarity. Secondly, you get free plants from what is a very expensive plant to buy. Remember this process takes quite a long time – anything up to 6 months. I have great hopes that all my pups will eventually come to life. The photo below shows my pups bursting into life.

Extracting Stephanotis seeds. Together with my Sago plant pup triumph, I am also very proud of being able to extract Stephanotis seeds from a pod. I am telling you these plant triumphs to inspire you. If you just buy plants from a garden centre you are “a shopper”, but if you grow them yourself, you are “a gardener” and the creative joy of gardening will always beat the sugar rush you get from buying instant plants – and it’s all free. Anyway enough of the preaching, let’s talk about the Stephanotis seeds.

I was visiting a neighbours garden in our village in Spain, when they showed me a large pod that had sprung from their Stephanotis. They asked me if I would like to have it, to which I of course said yes. I assumed that the pod was immature, but could eventually yield seeds. To ripen it I placed it on my potting bench in full sun for part of the day and shade when too hot. I turned the pod every other day to ensure it got even heat coverage. The pod began to shrink and dry in the sun, and at one point I thought it was just rotting. But instead nature was working its wonders. The heat and drying process was maturing the seeds in the pod and the pod would eventually start to split. The photos below show the pod starting to split, and the seeds beginning to form. Click on each photo for a larger view.

Once I had deemed the seeds were mature, I placed the whole pod into a plastic bag and took them into my kitchen (out of the wind) and began to extract the seeds. It was lovely as each seed came with its own little gossamer parachute to carry it on the wind. After, extracting each of the seeds I placed them into an envelope ready to plant next year. Unfortunately, I had left the kitchen window open and all the fluffy little parachutes blew all over the house. When Cruella (my wife) complained at the mess I said it must be Tango the lonely blind Labrador who is moulting. The photos below show the seed extracting process and my fall guy, Tango. Click on each photo for a larger view.

Harvesting Chillis. If you have grown Chillis then you need to harvest them almost on a daily basis as the pods turn fully bright red. By harvesting them in this way you convince the plant it needs to keep flowering and thereby encourage more chilli pods. To harvest chillis you just snip off each pod but leave a small bit of stem to stop any rot starting. Freshly harvested chillis can be placed in a plastic bag in the freezer and will last all year. Whenever, you need a fresh chilli just take one out of your plastic bag and chop it up frozen and add it to your cooking. The photos below show the daily chilli harvest. Click on each photo for a larger view.

I disband the chicken football team. To be honestI didn’t want to disband the chicken football team, but they just wouldn’t do the training. I blame it on Cruella (my wife), she has pampered them, overfed them and encouraged a bad attitude. The rot set in when they refused to do the morning training runs. Each morning I would get them out of their coop early ready for training. We would start with some stretching exercises, which to be honest they only did half heartedly. They would languidly stretch out alternate wings whilst yawning, but the most embarrassing part was when they tried to pull one leg up behind them to stretch; they are all so fat they just kept falling over.

After the stretching we would go for a training run around the lawn, or at least Tango the lonely blind Labrador and I ran, the chickens just puffed along behind complaining, stopping to peck, some even tried to get out of training saying they had ladies problems and had to go lay an egg. The end result was I was met one morning at the front door by a delegation demanding to see Cruella and insisting they would no longer train. The photo below shows the delegation.

Despite Cruella’s intervention I insisted that it would be good for them and training must go on. However, they resorted to guerrilla tactics and in an act of wanton vandalism they just dug up the pitch. Needless to say the team is now disbanded. Nevertheless, Tango the lonely blind Labrador and I still go for early morning training runs past their coop. They sit there sullen eyed, watching us as we puff past laughing away in chickenese as poor old Tango crashes into yet another tree. The photos below show the damage to the lawn (pitch) and the extensive repairs I had to make. Click on each photo for a larger view.