Helen's Garden Renovation Project

The past two weeks have been exceptionally fine and sunny, with hardly any rain. I have had six stints at the conifer excavation site, each lasting about one and a half hours, and after all this work I have removed two of the trunks. After cutting through the biggest roots, I pushed the tree over in several directions until the rest of the roots snapped or were exposed enough for me to see them and snip through them.

Removal of first conifer

It is then necessary to dig a bit deeper to remove the snapped off roots to enough depth to give the new resident of the hole plenty of room to grow. Well, probably it is. I’m not taking any chances, as I do not intend to be replacing the next lot of conifers.

Roots exposed after Saturday's stint of digging

I took the two photographs above yesterday, but this morning I made some more progress. I dug up the conifer next to the one I took out on Saturday. This involved sawing through one root with my lovely chipboard saw, which was a Christmas present from my parents in 1987. I did not use the scary Alligator because it was only about nine o’clock on Sunday morning and I thought it might be a bit noisy, and I didn’t want to get mud in its teeth from the dirty root, not because I was too scared of it. It’s a perfectly safe tool if used sensibly.

I have given the potted plants their third dose of Wilkinson’s Wonder Gro, so that should keep them quiet until March. I think I will have to give them some more Vine Weevil killer too as it is only supposed to last for four months. Perhaps I can do that on Monday, which is forecast to be another fine day. It will make a change from digging.

On Friday I took some cuttings of my pelargoniums very badly. According to Gardeners’ World shown that very evening, I should use a knife sharp enough to dig into my thumbnail, choose non-flowering stems, and put the cuttings round the edge of a pot, using compost with bits of grit in it. Instead, I snapped the cuttings off without using any weapons, not caring about whether the break was particularly near a nodule in the stem or not, pulled off the lower leaves, and put them in B&Q stem and cutting compost, on special offer last spring. I put each one in a separate pot. Out of my seven cuttings, six were flowering or in bud. I have put them on a sunny, cold windowsill. (The windowsill is cold because it is in a room I hardly ever heat, and it’s now cold enough to need heating in the mornings and evenings). Let’s see what happens. My hypothesis is that taking pelargonium cuttings is so easy that even if you do it very badly, they will succeed. If I am wrong, and I don’t realise they are dead until the frost kills the pelargoniums outside, it doesn’t matter because I have a plant growing indoors and can take some cuttings off that in the proper manner. I will, of course, report the outcome honestly in this blog.

Very badly taken pelargonium cuttings

On Monday I was just outside chatting to a neighbour when I managed to flag down a passing tree surgeon and got him to quote for shortening the Leylandii trunks and trimming the hedges. He also said how about trimming the silver birch, and I said wouldn’t the pond be in the way, and he said no, so I said do the silver birch as well.

(It is, of course, sometimes a bad idea to have work done on the house or garden by someone who just happens to be passing. However, I have had this tree surgeon’s leaflet through my door a few times over several years. Anyone who has been in business as a tree surgeon for several years is probably competent, for obvious reasons).

So on Friday, as the FTSE-100 soared to its biggest one-day percentage rise since it was invented, and short-selling was banned on financial shares, I handed over the entire contents of my hedge fund to the tree surgeon, and the sun shone brightly all day. I think he did a good job, although I don’t think he trimmed the hedges as neatly as my usual tree surgeon. However, it was a good price, the hedges look miles better than they did before, and most importantly, he happened to be there when I needed the job done. He trimmed my Leylandii trunks to about 3 ft high. I would have preferred them to be a little longer (I asked him to do 4-5 ft) so I could have more leverage, but I think I will be able to manage fine.

Leylandii trunks cut down to about 3 feet

I may be taking a short position on my beautiful Lawsonian Cypress ‘Pelts Blue’ in the corner next spring, but that’s only to make it more bushy, not because I can’t afford a stake for it and want to get the government to prop it up for me. OK, enough of the hedging jokes.

This morning the sun was still shining for some reason, and I started digging the Leylandii up. I started in the corner, because this one is the biggest tree and the hardest to get at, so I thought I would do it first and then the others will seem much easier. My technique for digging up trees is to dig a big hole around them and trim away any small roots, just leaving the big ones. Then I can cut through the big roots and push the tree over.

Leylandii with roots exposed

Just getting to the stage shown in the photograph was a lot of work. I think it may have taken as much as an hour and a half. At this point I realised that the whole task was going to cost thousands of calories, so I went in for a cup of tea and baked myself a cake.

This morning I chopped off all the branches of the four Leylandii trees that I am replacing, apart from the ones right at the very top which I couldn’t reach.

The four Leylandii trees after I had removed almost all their branches

It was quite an easy job removing them. Most of them were thin enough to come off with my telescopic loppers, and I sawed through the rest using a hand saw. I didn’t use my Alligator Loppers because I want to practise a bit more before disobeying the instructions not to use them while standing on a ladder. The thing to do is to look up while you are cutting off the branch several feet above your head, and then look down, so the branch falls on the back of your head and neck rather than on your face. In fact, because the hedge is so thick and tangled, falling branches did not gather a lot of speed and therefore it wasn’t painful having them land on me. As Leylandii branches bring me out in a rash on contact it was a good thing not to have them touching my face.

When renewing a hedge on a boundary, it is a good idea to notify your neighbours first. If they like the hedge, they will be disappointed when they see it go, and if they don’t like it, they will be disappointed when the new one starts growing. Although it is a supposedly well-known fact that everyone hates Leylandii, my neighbours like the hedge for the same reason that I do – it gives them privacy. So I have warned them about what I am doing and therefore I hope they did not get too much of a shock seeing bits of my garden for the first time (the hedge was there when they moved in). I think I did quite well to drop only one branch into their garden – I retrieved it with a rake, so that my shredder will not be deprived.

I now need to decide whether I am going to remove the poles myself or get a tree surgeon to do the job. Although they look quite thin in the photograph, they are at least the size of an upper arm, and it can be quite hard work sawing through something of this size when it is vertical. It will also be a fair amount of work digging the stumps out, but I think I can manage this as long as I take my time about it. While I think about this, the next job is to shred all the remains. Stripping the trees took me about one and a half hours. I expect the shredding to take at least that.

The magnolia’s leaves are going brown. I hope this is because it thinks it is autumn, and not because it thinks it’s fed up with being in a pot. I did give it some plant food granules last week.

I decided to spend some of last year’s tutoring income on some new power tools. I decided that after keeping my patient boyfriend’s shredder for about a year, it was time I gave it back and bought my own. I bought a Bosch AXT 2200 HP Silent Garden Shredder. The picture on the box showed it eating a large shrub, so I decided to decorate mine with some Leylandii for this photograph.

Bosch 2200 HP Silent Garden Shredder

After a successful shredding session I feel able to make the following observations

(1) It is not silent but it is very quiet and peaceful sounding, until you give it a thick branch, when it sings a bit until it’s got through it.

(2) It’s best not to give it a whole shrub in one go, despite the picture on the box. The reason is that the shredding is done by a wheel with spiky bits on it, and you need to shove the branch through the right-hand side of the slot, which is the side that has the wheel edge going downwards. If you try and put it through the left-hand side of the slot, the wheel will just push it back out at you. If you trim off all the side branches to the right of the main stem and shove the stem in, it won’t get pushed to the left by the side branches and therefore it goes down much more easily.

(3) The shredder comes with a bag to collect the chippings, but I haven’t tried this because I have a handy blue cuboid bucket (see photo) which is just the right size. It takes very little time to fill it.

(4) If you want to use an extension lead, it needs to be able to take at least 10A.

(5) It doesn’t shred things into very tiny lumps, but for my purposes, it’s fine.

The shredder was very expensive (£250 from Amazon) but as I reckon I have forty years at least of gardening life still in me, it will be worth the money. Buying cheap shredders just leads to annoyance when things get stuck in them.

Next, I got out my Black and Decker GK1000 Alligator Loppers. This tool is basically a safe chainsaw, but it is still a chainsaw, and to me it looks scary. Note fearful grin in photograph, despite wearing safety equipment and, even safer, not plugging it in.

Alligator Loppers

I bought the loppers from Carl F because they had a really good price for them. When I enquired about the type of power supply, Carl F emailed back to me to say that they were battery powered, with two batteries, an intelligent one hour charger, a battery level indicator and a kit box. Wow, that sounds good, I thought. But when I got the loppers, I found that they just had an ordinary power lead. This doesn’t actually matter because batteries have their disadvantages – you have to remember to charge them up, and they can make the tool heavy. And I have an extension lead. So I decided not to send them back. But I do wonder what the wonderful tool is that has these two batteries and all the other good stuff.

I had some convenient silver birch logs that I thought I’d practise on, so I oiled the machine, pinged the chain a bit to see if it was set correctly (no idea, but the chaps in the factory probably put it on right), turned them on, waited a bit to make sure the chain was running at full speed as per instructions, and then clamped its jaws around a log. I liked the way that it wasn’t very noisy, not like a tree surgeon’s chainsaw. And it sliced through the log in no time. I mean, it was probably about two seconds maximum. But what I didn’t like was that the log jumped about at the start, and it wasn’t a clean cut.

Mess left by alligator loppers

If I had been pruning a tree that I wanted to keep alive, I would have had to get an ordinary saw out to make another, smoother cut. I am not sure whether this jumping effect was because the log wasn’t attached to anything. Maybe if I cut off a branch that was still attached to a tree it wouldn’t move. Reassuringly, the tool didn’t jump around – it is light, and the handgrips are easy to grip firmly. I don’t know whether there is something I am doing wrong, or whether this tool just doesn’t cut cleanly. And also the instructions say you are not allowed to go up a ladder and use the loppers. I wish I knew whether this is proper health and safety advice, like don’t try to take the chain off when the tool is plugged in, or bogus health and safety advice, like the label on our bottle of surgical spirit at work which warns that it could be harmful if you get any on your skin, despite the fact that one of the intended uses of the stuff is to dab it on your skin to harden it.

This Saturday my parents came to visit to celebrate my birthday by eating a curry. My mum told me that my plants were starving and should not be as yellow-leaved as that. (On the plus side, nobody made any comments about the dust on the skirting board or the cobwebs in the corners). I had actually noticed the plants were looking yellow and had absently wondered why before going onto the next job. Since it is still the growing season, just about, I went to Wilkinson’s this lunchtime and bought a box of Wonder gro for £1.79. The box had four bags of blue crystals in it, but no scoop, in contradiction to what it said on the box. However, I guessed that the scoop must be the size of a teaspoon, and used a measure that I already had. The stuff dissolved very easily and quickly. I also found that my special watering can helped. It is a Nucan, and I bought it from B&Q sometime in the days when we had hot summers, because I needed a watering can, and it was the only one they had left. It has a push button which controls the water flow, and this is very handy when filling about 200 small pots with plant food while trying not to get much on the paving underneath.

I also bought some Levington granules for my acid-loving plants, but they weren’t as easy to use because you have to work them into the soil, and this is difficult when you have roots and under-planting in the way. I did my best, but I think I will just have to pay the worms overtime to do the job for me.