String Fences

May 07, 2025

Goose, our duck, smiling

I’ve finally planted out every fucking sugarsnap pea that I knew I would regret starting at the same time. Four seedling trays and a million hacked together trellises out of whatever was lying about: some made from bamboo, others from hazel we found by the stream, even a few made from miscellaneous plastic sticks. And yet, I’ve just planted 60 more beans. Just in case.

As a quarter of May is now gone and we are well over halfway through Spring, I find myself feeling behind and sometimes a bit frantic. Behind what though? This is not my job, I am not being graded on how many broccoli I plant out, and thanks to perennials, we will have plenty of food over summer that we will not have to buy from grocery stores, swaddled in layers of plastic. I can’t feasibly make my peas grow faster, nor my cauliflower, and why should I want them to grow faster anyway? I leaned deeply into living seasonally last year, allowing myself to take on a little too much over the summer, resting fully over the winter, and yet now Spring is here and it’s as though I have forgotten everything I’ve learned.

We have allowed our overwintered brassicae to bolt, partially because we would like to collect a number of the seeds to plant again this year, but also because the pollinators have been enjoying them so much more than I had imagined. We have a number of beautiful flowers in our garden - Nepeta and Erysimum remaining firm favourites to the bees - but none so enticing as an overwintered kale that has been allowed to bolt. So appealing is this little patch, that it emits a constant low hum from being surrounded by myriad little bugs. I am quite sure that I have seen many more pollinators this year already than I did by this time last year, and have been trying to read about how to further them. I was watching a white moth dance around a pea tepee yesterday, only for Bennie to run over and eat it straight out of the sky. Savage.

Along with all of the sugarsnaps, I managed to plant out all of the broccoli, cauliflower and nasturtium I had started in pots and trays last month. Naturally, this means that the mini greenhouse is once again empty, and needs refilled. It’s like the milk/cereal or crisps/dip conundrum. I have filled one shelf with what feels like a million beetroots, which we really tried last year but had very little luck with. This year instead of avoiding them, we have decided to plant so many that they can’t all get eaten. We also noticed last year that white cauliflower didn’t work for us at all, but our romanesco did very well. This year I have planted heaps of romanesco, but must bring myself to try the white cauliflower again. Taking up another shelf in the mini greenhouse will be the tomatoes from seed we will atempt to grow this year. Last year we got seedlings from our local nursery, but this year we have a variety we are excited about. For those interested the variety is Costoluto Fiorentino, and we will update accordingly.

As many of you know, either from knowing us personally, or from reading previous posts, we had a polytunnel that we had to retire at the start of the year. After a number of conversations, we have opted for a glass and steel greenhouse this year. We are still in the process of building it, and we are so excited! While I plan to attempt a number of tomato plants outside, I would also like the guarantee of growing that a greenhouse brings.

Because we like to allow our land to remain quite wild with docks, thistles and dandelions springing up as they fancy, it can be a little difficult to remember where we can walk and where I planted baby leeks last week. We have tried to make a woodchip path a number of times, but the ducks dig around it with their noses, which spreads it out quite a lot, and the chickens scratch at it to forage, spreading it even further and often burying those little leeks. While we are getting better at remembering what we have planted and where, we like to have our friends and family feel as though they don’t have to stand at the edge while we point things out. A food forest, even in its early stages, should be an interactive and inclusive experience. We are now trialling string and twig fencing. This is where we take coppiced hazel, bamboo or other branches we have no current use for, stick them into the ground a foot or so apart and attach them with string. To aid my poor description, I invited you to imagine is as a really haphazard rope bridge. I have planted beans along them and I am eager to see how the living fencing looks when encumbered with beans and peas.

Our indoor plants have been enjoying all the sun, and our maranta, which grew plenty over the winter, is absolutely flourishing to the point where she needed a few haircuts. Our monstera got divided and repotted ready for new growth, ditto our pilea peperomioides, and our blue star fern was moved to somewhere quite a bit shadier. We were fortunate to be gifted an aloe vera by a friend, and it has grown more green by the day. We have been using it liberally to help soothe any skin that has seen a little too much sun! We are thankful for the weather app at the moment, since it feels as though with the changing climate we are getting multiple seasons in one day, and this Spring has been much warmer and sunnier than a number of summers we have had in the past.

My hamstring feels much recovered in terms of strength, but still has a while to go in terms of endurance and range of motion. I remind myself each time I get frustrated that recovery cannot and should not be rushed. It might feel fine one minute on the ice doing a sit spin, but trying to do forward inside loops creates this unsettling tension which runs the whole way down the back of my leg, and pangs halfway through a back outside counter. Strength training feels as good as it ever has, but since my injury, I live in fear of stretching.

Final updates include allowing Bilbo to sit on some eggs. She has been broody for a few weeks, and rather than fight it, we have offered her some of Ava and Goose’s eggs. Will they hatch? Won’t they? Do chickens make good parents to ducklings? Is there a hormonal float among chickens? We aren’t sure. For all we know, Geoffrey has been firing blanks all this time and all we get are some very rotten eggs and a grumpy Bilbo. Ginny seems to have ‘caught’ some broodiness, and is now also attempting to hatch some eggs as well. I find myself looking for answers to bizarre questions on chicken forums when I am meant to be doing more pressing things.

(aj)