Bohemian Antiks Continue

Garden-Gate

No - not that kind of gate.

Yesterday, while we were out Pig managed to untie the wired string holding my metal fence together. When we got home she was happily pootling around with Dog in the front garden. She had eaten most of the kale, and all the red currents were gone. No, we are not going to eat our sweet Pig in some act of bloody revenge, but I will reinforce the fence. And plant more seeds.

One of our key objectives in moving to the White House was to build a more sustainable life for ourselves.  And an obvious component of that ideology is to try to buy less stuff by producing our own food. Every year we find a new way to fail in this endeavor.

The Dunning Kreuger effect is the scientific name given to the phenomenon that those that know the least about any given subject feel the most confident about their knowledge. Those with the smallest amount of ability will think to themselves "what could go wrong?". Oh so many things. As soon as a person develops any level of expertise in a field they are able to be a far more accurate judge. My plan was to plant a food forest of many trees and perennial veggies. My reality is an ongoing arms race with various animals, of which human are, as always, the most dangerous

So, you may be unavoidably taken away from home to keep company a sick friend, and have your perennials garden destroyed root and branch by a thorough and disciplined visitor who cannot tell the difference between Asparagus and plants they consider weeds (actually volunteers).

Or a goat may get into the garden in the winter and kill young trees in minutes by stripping the bark in a ring around the base. Goat once did this, but I thought the tree recovered by sending up a side shoot. It took me eight years to learn that the tree was no longer the Apricot tree that I had nursed for nearly a decade as it battled through against impossible frosts. When it finally set fruit it turned out to have transformed via a root stock (where they use a different, stronger tree variety for the lower part of tree, and graft the more exciting fruit to the top) of an unimpressive Mirabelle plum.

Or your seedlings are scratched out of the ground by hungry hens.

Or a particular chicken develops a taste for kale.

Or a gate is left open so the veggie spiral is decimated by your curious sheep.

Or a visitor takes it upon himself to weed out all the rocket to give the dandelions more space to grow.

Or you accidentally bonsai all your seedlings by leaving them too long in the trays.

We do what we can to put measures in place to tackle each new problem that emerges, but like plane crash investigators, it's kind of too late after the event.

This year I'm happy with a front garden that is loaded with tomatoes, and healthy looking chilli plants in their massive plant pot tyre stacks. And we (both the plants and I) are beginning to recover from the trauma of Garden-Gate 2017.

So now my strategy is threefold:

1, with a huge sense of optimism to put all my seeds in the ground in the spring

2, accept that we will have good goat milk and plenty of eggs from happy animals who are free t eat what they like.

3, I have learned to eat the volunteers (the technical name given to what some people call weeds).