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.
[...] where the wild strawberries (Fragaria Vesca) have stubbornly conquered almost half the ground and, prior to this Spring, where hundreds of Spanish Bluebells pernicious in their spread once ruled, stand six apple [...]