It feels like winter has been taking way too long and my hands are just ithcing to head outside and do stuff with the garden again. But it is just way too early in the season as the temperatures are stuck around zero degrees Celsius during the day, and at night even having some decent frost.
There aren't a lot of garden things to do in February because of this, but still there are some headless jobs to do, and stuff that you can start already at the beginning of the year that will provide you with some fun later on. Recently I went on with giving the bramble some good trim and this is not something to take lightly.
I love the fact that the bramble is also a winter green plant and it gives some good colour still while everything is brown and gray.
See the bramble (or blackberry) bush is a 2 year plant. The first year is gives out its shoots, and the second year these shoots produce fruit. Now I wasn't always aware of that bramble and blackberry is kind of the same thing.
According to Susan Rushton "a bramble is a blackberry and vice versa. Blackberry is the fruit and bramble the bush. Bramble is wild (Rubus vulgaris) and blackberry (Rubus fruiticosus) is cultivated. Bramble is the northern name and blackberry the southern."
So after the bramble produces fruits (blackberries) the stems turn from flexible moisty green shoots into dry woods with thorns on it as you can see in the picture underneith here.
That wood is an issues because it also takes like two years to fall apart and decompose, leaving less space for the new shoots to grow.
So it was time for some decent winter chopping!
Chop chop
Now the good thing about a foresty yard is that there is enough space to just chop everything down and let it decompose in the forest. The bad news is that these shoots had also grown outside the forest part and it was more of a hassle to toss them back into the forest that I also just got rid of some of the shoots.
And it crazy what kind of amounts of wood there are there. This stuff just grows and grows with like a meter of shoot in a week and you can see that back behind the scenes here. There are just wooden shoots everywhere.
The annoying part of this is that these stems also still have a lot of spikes on there. Only when they are just on the brink of falling apart that is when the spikes get less and it is just a stem with nothing anymore.
Now I saw back in 'Clarksons Farm' that he used goats to get rid of the bramble, because they stamp and walk all over the shoots with their hooves and just eat the wooden parts. But that seems like too much if a hassle to borrow some goats over here ;) (would be fun though!)
But with this kinds of chores and also just starting to grow new small plants as you can see in this post it seems there is still enough to do in February regarding the garden.