30 May, 2010
The rain is bucketing down. The ground is sodden. Pools of water are proliferating.
Hoeing the weeds off the potatoes is out of the question.
Sowing seeds is not an option.
Forking the herb bed to clear space for the boys’ sunflowers results in sticky gloop.
The hammers, maul, post driver, crow bar and fencing tools are too wet and slippery to use safely.
So, what to do?
Ahah, the raspberries need weeding. They’re being crowded by couch grass, bluebells, poppies, sticky willie and nettles.
The weeds can’t be forked out without disturbing the raspberry roots, but that’s no bother.
I can get down on my knees and pull the weeds by hand.
Of course, my leather gloves quickly soak up vast amounts of moisture and become slick, useless and heavy.
I strip my gloves off and resume work.
After a couple of hours kneeling in wet grass, with rain soaking my hat, gushing down my neck, creeping up my sleeves and trickling through the seams of my jacket, I’m making good progress.
So why do I recommend that you do not attempt this at home?
Try imagining the effects of a long, long, long bath, when your hands swell, go white and the skin starts to crumble.
Add a gritty, abrasive rubdown with sandy mud and prickly plants.
Throw in copious amounts of gunge made up of poppy sap, crushed slugs and other unidentified goop.
Then finish with an extremely generous and thorough thrashing with large armfuls of stinging nettles.
My hands are covered in nettle rash and blisters, the skin is crumbling off, and they feel both numb and tingling at the same time.
But it’s not all bad.
My left little finger, which doesn’t normally bend too well as the result of an ill-set fracture many years ago, always works much better after a thorough nettling so I can use the keyboard’s Left Shift, 1, Q, A and Z keys with ease.
Which is more than can be said for the rest of the keys.
Aah, there is a time for a good book and there is a time for work….. now is the time for the good book.
Oh, and add a nice cuppa, with the feet up too!
Well to sell ‘em Stoney – you make it sound great!
Keep on keeping on fella – its all we can do
SBW
Well, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t enjoy it.
Would I?
Now I feel guilty that it isn’t raining. Funny thing is you’re not putting me off trying this way of life…
I’m not trying to put anyone off. Nor am I trying to show how tough I am or how hard I work (as some commenters/emailers like to accuse me of doing). I’m simply describing some of the things that we do around the croft—whether mundane, hard work, or a little crazy.
Haven’t you heard of rubbing nettle stings with dock leaves? Brings almost immediate relief.
It wasn’t a matter of brushing past one or two nettles. I pulled out almost two barrowloads of nettles from beneath the raspberries. I couldn’t stop every 30 seconds to rub myself with dock leaves, and they wouldn’t have had much effect on stinging caused by that amount of nettles.
Besides, I’m somewhat used to it as I pick large amounts of nettles to make nettle ale.
Every time I weed I end up with scratches, stings etc. I start out wearing gloves but even the ones marked “small” are too flaming big, so they get on my nerves for a while then get ditched. According to one website I found, stinging nettles have been used for a long time to treat joint pain (among other things).