Taken from Lynne’s weekly column ‘Green Scene’ for the Western Mail
29th August 2020
Where’s Your Bean?
Crikey – we can touch September on the nose already. And ‘just one Bank Holiday before Christmas’, as my brother mentioned, cheerfully.
I still have a 2020 diary – unused – if anyone wants it?
What a year. Apart from the obvious unexpected events, we had our summer in April and May, although my trusty Facebook memories show that August last year was pretty erratic too. For the last few years September has always been a really nice month, so fingers crossed that trend continues.
It’s a busy time in the garden, if you don’t mind getting wet or blown inside out. I’ve been busy cutting all the ox eyed daisies back in my own plot. They looked absolutely fabulous earlier but there are a lot of them so I tried to catch them before they went to seed – and failed I think, so there will be even more over the next couple of years.
I’ve still got something pinching my tomatoes, but my runner ‘bean’ (seriously, I have one runner bean. I wasn’t going to tell you but this is Gardener’s Real World, so I feel obligated to share my failures as well as my successes) is doing well. I’m not quite sure when I’m going to pick it and thankfully a kind neighbour has kept me well supplied with runner beans so I haven’t missed out totally.
Only One Way to Get Rid of a Mole
To top it all I now have a mole running amok in the garden – the whole garden, the veggie patch, the flowerbeds and the lawn. Hence everyone reminding me of the famous Jasper Carrot quote (best Google it if you’re too young to remember it).
Moles are particularly busy in the autumn, catching worms, biting their heads off and storing them in underground ‘larders’ for the winter. So whilst my own winter provisions are looking a bit bleak, my mole’s larder must be overflowing.
As you can see, Yogi the terrierist is on the case but with all the noise and fuss she makes whilst digging and snorting down the molehill, the mole will be in Gilwern before she breaks the surface.
Another neighbour told me that he had given his son a patch of ground for his veg and he had a mole undermining his crops. Apparently he sprinkled a powder on top of the soil and the mole left – straight into his Dad’s veggie patch! I’ll have to find out what the powder was.
At a talk I gave last year I was told about a homemade solution that was effective. Simply mix Tabasco sauce and chopped garlic with dish soap, which acts as a surfactant to get it deeper into the soil. Mixing in some chilli powder notches up the heat and effectiveness of the repellent – and makes it sound more like MasterChef. Adding these components to water makes a solution you can pour into holes and tunnels. Mix 6 tablespoons of Tabasco sauce, a whole bulb of garlic (chopped) and 4 tablespoons each of dish soap and chilli powder in a gallon of water for a good starting mixture.
Douse all tunnel openings regularly and excavate the middles of tunnels with a metal stake to pour more of the mixture in. If you do this regularly, the Tabasco sauce and chilli is supposed to soak into the soil and make it unpalatable for the moles and they’ll leave. Either that or they will enjoy their marinated worms and invite their friends around for dinner!
Bootiful
After 35 years of gardening, and being outdoors most of my life, I have finally found the perfect pair of work boots. For someone who is renowned for his or her barefoot accomplishments, that’s quite a ‘feat’, I can tell you. I am either booted or barefoot – nothing in between. No flip flops or heels for me!
Work boots are so important and I have worked hard to find the perfect pair over the years. As I often said during interviews, “To be barefoot I have to be hardy, but to be barefoot in work would just be fool-hardy.”
I am so ridiculously excited by my new boots. Even more so, as the contents of my wardrobe are black, I took a gamble and plumped for a rather outlandish colour too. My very first colourful work boots.
They are very comfortable and the perfect fit, which is always a worry when buying on line. I’ve had to wear two pairs of socks with some of my other online-boots, not ideal in the summer. They are definitely going to be a fab’luss walking boot too. I’m thrilled with the green colour (not too Kermit) and they also do some other quite funky colours as well as traditional black or brown. They are waterproof (and breathable), lightweight and have great grippers. Remember, as a kid, showing everyone your grippers on new trainers? I have actually been like a 5 year old, waving my booted foot in front of everyone asking, “Seen my new boots?”
They make me smile every time I put them on; I’m sure most people smile when they take their work boots off.
But the coolest thing of all is the new lace set up. Or ‘no-lace’ set up. And yes, it took me 10 minutes to work out – annoyingly there are no instructions! It is a twist lock system which you simply turn (and which makes a very satisfying click-click noise when you do so). I managed that bit okay but I couldn’t for the life of me see how you slackened them off to take the boots off. It transpires that you lift the twisty thing to release it. It’s so cutting edge – I am SO ahead of the curve, in the boot arena at least.
Not surprisingly, they are German – and as the company is renowned for high quality work-wear, I shall definitely be investing in some of their other kit too.
Have a look for yourself at www.engelbert-strauss.co.uk – and if you get stuck undoing your non-laces, give me a shout.
Pop a garic clove into the run of the mole and the smell should move him. Where he moves to is/can be the problem, but more cloves will help here xxx