Goosegrass

It was probably inevitable that declaring a hosepipe ban would usher in weeks of heavy rain. After all, it is April. And if there’s one plant in particular that I’ve noticed making the most of the wet weather and romping through every garden, it’s goosgrasss. I spent most of Friday afternoon gardening up to my elbows and, at one point, ears in the stuff (I should point out that I was lying down in order to weed under an awkward cornus – it’s rampant, but not that rampant). Galium aparine is known by many other names; in addition to goosegrass, perhaps most commonly cleavers, but also stickyweed, catchweed, coachweed, bedstraw (from its historic use as a matress stuffing), robin-run-the-hedge and, of course, sticky willy. Though I’m much too mature to find that particular epithet even remotely funny.

I lied, of course, it’s ridiculously amusing, and at least fifty percent accurate as a description. This stuff is sticky – persistently, annoyingly so, clinging to your hands, your clothes, even your hair as you try to disentangle it from your prize plants without pulling bits of them off in the process. But, like so many other weeds, the characteristics that make it so frustrating for the gardener are the same ones that allow it to flourish and colonise our borders with such abandon, its long, sprawling stems creeping over the ground, and inveigling their way through and over plants, finally smothering them utterly. And then it turns out that the plant isn’t sticky at all – rather tiny hairs on the leaves and stem work in the same way as velcro, with hooked ends which grasp skin, hair and fur, and of course, give the plant a firm hold on any plant matter it feels the need to clamber over. Effective stuff.

While hoiking it out by the handful it may be diverting to muse that herbalists have found several uses for it. Just as well you might think, it being so wanton, although I think I might stick to oranges and tomatoes for my daily dose of vitamin C in which it’s apparently particularly rich. It has been used to lower blood pressure, as a treatment for bites and for cystitis, although quite how you apply it I’m not entirely sure. A tea made from the stuff is a diuretic and a laxative (I have a sneaking suspicion that if you make a tea from sufficient quantities of any plant, it’ll have a similar effect. Unless it kills you first.)

All most interesting and very worthy. Mine’s still going on the compost.

Mini orchard

The apple trees are planted – a milestone in our home. We’ve always known where we wanted them but somehow, with a rundown house to renovate, garden buildings to erect, borders to fill with flowers and the kitchen garden to fill with annual veg, it always slipped to the bottom of the list. Which is a shame because planting fruit trees really should be one of the first things you do when you move into a new house, partly for the practical reason that it will take a year or two before they bear fruit (the maturation period depends on the vigour of the rootstock; larger trees take longer to achieve their productive potential), but mainly because there’s nothing better than planting a fruit tree to make you feel as though you’ve put down roots. Quite literally.


I find it interesting why that should be – it’s wonderful to provide salad and vegetables from your own garden, but an apple or pear tree* provides a more permanent link to the land, and the opportunity to have one growing on your own little piece of the world is a privilege not to be taken for granted. To watch it grown and mature, to see its naked grey twigs clothed with young leaves in spring; to revel in outrageously generous blossom and finally - at last! - to pluck a fruit from the tree and taste your whole garden in one bite of its warm, swollen goodness as the juice runs down your hand. Now that’s a thing.

April lies toward the end of the season for planting bare-root trees, so I shall be relieved when our trees show some signs of life. We have chosen three varieties, each on the dwarf rootstock M27. This means that they’ll need permanent staking, reaching a maximum height of around six feet, but has the advantage for the impatient that they should fruit within a year or two. Firstly, we have opted for Blenheim Orange, a traditional dual purpose apple for cooking and eating, with crisp yellow flesh and large golden fruits striped with red. Known for its disgraceful sexual proclivities as a ‘triploid’ apple it needs to be pollinated by two other varieties, and all three should flower at a similar time for obvious reasons. So we also have the nutty Fiesta, a new strain developed at the East Malling Research station, similar to Cox’s Orange Pippin but, we are told, more reliable to grow, and Laxton’s Superb, which crops from November like the other two. All have excellent reputations for flavour – daft to chose something that doesn’t excel in this respect unless you’re only growing the fruit for throwing at people, and we don’t really have the space here for that, though I imagine some of the windfalls could be used for this purpose at a push. And of course, we have the neighbours’ Bramley which crops heavily on our side of the back fence.

So, our mini orchard is taking shape. Pears next, and an apricot for the south facing fence behind the cold frames. I fear this could become an addiction.


*Surely this should apply equally to cherries, plums and gages, but while I love them, I don’t seem to have the same emotional connection to stone fruits as I do to pome fruits. It’s a personal thing.