Spring has sprung and ...there is a JCB in my vegetable garden!

Apologies for delay in new posting. Two things came up : getting the veggie-patch up and running and last-minute preparation for the US university-entrance SAT examinations coming up on Saturday – good luck to all who are sitting them now. Anyway, everyone would have been otherwise involved in the wedding celebrations…..street parties, sarnie and char get-togethers, tissues at the ready! I’m so glad she didn’t agree to ‘obey’.

 Thanks to those who have, in the meantime, become followers  - welcome! J - or who have left comments - I will be getting back to you very shortly.

Spring has arrived and with it brought to mind a poem, an anonymous one featured in Arnold Silcock’s ‘Verse and Worse’. The following version, complete with Yiddish elements, I learned as a kid in the Highlands:

Spring is sprung

The grass is ris

I wonder where de boidies is?

De little boids is on the wing

 Ain’t that absoid?

-De little wings is on de boid!

In the Cottonfields we prepare for planting. Fortunately, following ten years of working the soil, it no longer requires the back-breaking, leg-jarring digging into compacted clay. Our neighbour is kind enough to come and surface-plough the overgrown weeds and grasses. Certainly, they need to be cleared, ready to  rotavate.                

But what about these olive trees in there? They’re in the shade of the conifers and, in turn, they block sunshine from the vegetable plants. They need to be moved. Which is where the JCB comes in. The driver can only come once his ‘day-job’ is over which is why, one mid-April evening, at dusk, this noisy monster invades our vegetable garden. The driver’s cabin is versatile and rotates, depending on which tool he wants to use : the great digger shovel or the robotic claw – the latter to be used on our unsuspecting olive trees. The space is limited so a great deal of delicate manoeuvering is needed to arrange the claw in the right place and at the right angle to best scoop at the soil to engage with maximum rootage. The skills of coordination required of the operator must be tantamount to those of airline pilots and the deed is done deftly and swiftly.  Like some great dendro-dentist, he tugs the molar-tree free from its base, levers it into the cradle of the claw and scoops it up to its new pre-prepared cavity. So, to continue the dental metaphor, this is a plant replant rather than an implant.

      

                                                         

The whole procedure was done so smoothly, although we’re talking really heavy equipment , and it was operated with such dexterity, that it appeared to be almost choreographed. I will now perhaps have to review my perceptions of Greek drivers! What I had not expected and what took my breath away was the gentle, caring way this huge claw turned itself inward and patted the tree into its new resting place.  A mechanical, yet maternal and majestic , final movement in this arboreal arrangement or, rather, rearrangement.

We were, however, left with huge craters and deeply embedded tread marks in our garden, which has to be re-rotavated. Then we can begin the planting of peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers.                             

                                

                                                     

    In the final shot you can see how we recycle old toilet roll bases to stop nasty, underground beasties eating the succulent young stems. You can also see doggie …………help with the watering!!