Pass on scything the grass

With Spring well underway - our first hearing of the cuckoo this year yesterday on the Kilcommon Pilgrim Loop and swifts swooping as we sat drinking our coffee and eating our hot cross buns on returning to the car at the end of the walk -  the grass in the garden of the house we are renting is growing by the day. Our neighbours on either side have scythed their grass - but the scythe is daunting and we're sure needs a certain technique that needs to be acquired but seems a bit 'too hard' right now. The house does not come with a mower so maybe the garden is going to be a wild meadow this year.

So the fairly newly planted trees - one hazel, two birches (?) and two unidentified - don't get smothered in this wild meadow garden, we weeded round them, laid newspaper and covered the newspaper with wood chippings - a pile unearthed from under a rampant thicket of thistles. (Method found on the internet when searching for 'uses of newspaper in an organic garden'.) One weekend Telegraph is a lot of newspaper. Then we tackled the blackcurrants that had been planted in the common strip alongside where our house might be built. Encroaching couch grass wasn't giving them much of a chance but clearing it from around the young bushes was a struggle. Five bushes done so far, eight to go (when our backs recover) on that particular common strip.

The young apple trees around the village and in the 'save the varieties' orchard are a mass of blossom. Will it be a good year for apples? The fruit set on the blackcurrants is promising. Yesterday on the Kilcommon Pilgrim Loop we marvelled at the bilberries. We'll have to go back in July. (Wikipedia: In Ireland, the fruit is known as fraughan, from the Irish fraochán, and is traditionally gathered on the last Sunday in July, known as "Fraughan Sunday".) The fruit are tiny and delicate so may take a while to pick.