I waited until they betrayed themselves. In the past fortnight hundreds of green sentinels had stabbed up through the soil’s winter skin. In a few weeks time the whole embankment would be a mess of fleshy leaves but now the fingers of bright, base green grouped in clumps made it easy to spot where to dig.
I love this type of gardening; A simple, repetitive task and my progress immediate and obvious, laid out before me. I took to the slope with a two forks and a trug. Expecting to yank out the bluebells whole with the minimum of fuss I was surprised to find how deep the colonies were rooted. I was pulling up fistfuls of the white balls but getting down to their layer wasn’t easy. The bulbs squeaked and ripped if my fork pushed into the pulp, I pushed and prised open the ground and then took to my knees and used my hand fork to scrape and dig down.
Bare earth beneath the apple trees.
I chucked the stems and bulb waste into the trug that I dragged around with me and when this was full I tipped the mass into one of the large garden waste square bags. I’ve found these to be really useful in all of my heavy garden clearance work. I can heave and drag the scratchy plastic bags down steps and over the ground, only one has torn to date.
Hours later the orchard bank was a mess of overturned soil with several deep pockets where I hadn’t smoothed over or filled in with spoil but satisfyingly there were no bluebell shoots.
