Helen's Garden Renovation Project

The weather is just being plain unreasonable. As soon as it gets warm enough for me to get a spade into the ground, it starts pouring down. Nevertheless, things have been happening. For a start, my greenhouse was delivered on Wednesday 14 January. I was at work, but I left the garage unlocked. This is how much space it takes up:

The greenhouse, stored in the garage

The base is not getting laid until towards the end of February, but that doesn’t matter because it will give me plenty of time to dig my trench for the cable. I will it as deep as I can be bothered, which is unlikely to be more than 18 inches. The only thing I am worried about is whether, if I dig the soil away from one side of the concrete fence posts, the fence will blow down. I am hoping that the sheer weight of the concrete will hold it fast. Also, unlike the fence on the other side of the garden, it has never shown any signs of wanting to fall down in the past thirteen years, so perhaps it will be all right.

So far I have managed to dig the entire trench to a spade’s depth, and moved all the topsoil over to the area by the pond, which gets it out of the way. I am now excavating deeper, and heaping the subsoil by the trench, so that when I fill it in, I can put the subsoil back in it first. We had two dry days – Tuesday and Wednesday – when I was at work during daylight hours, and then it poured with rain last night and this morning. In the afternoon the sun came out, but of course the ground was still very soggy. I checked the Met Office website, and there is a severe weather warning out for heavy rain this evening, so I decided I had better put in a stint of digging. I put in an hour just before it started to get dark, at about half past four. Because I have sandy soil, it is not waterlogged, but the soil is heavier when wet, so I can’t do as much without getting tired. But at least I did something. We have unsettled weather forecast for the next few days, but perhaps I will be able to continue on Monday.

One of my neighbours came and looked at my damaged fence (see last entry) and thought that it was done by an intruder climbing over the fence. Sadly, I think she is right. Although I had thought the damage must have been done from the other side of the fence because the splinters are on my side, the splinters could also have landed there if someone’s foot pressed down on the wood while heaving themselves onto the shed roof. I’m glad I have chosen toughened glass for my greenhouse if people are going to come into my garden at night and climb on things.

We have had the most amazing spell of cold weather. I can’t remember when it last was this cold for so long. The Met Office has been giving us severe weather warnings and the government will make extra payments to pensioners because the weather is so cold. Until 22nd December, the Met Office stuck to its story that it will be a warmer than average winter, but now it’ll have to be about twenty degrees all through February if that’s going to happen, so they’re claiming we’re going to have below average temperatures in January and near average in February.

I haven’t even been tidying up the garden because it has been too cold, but fortunately I got a lot of tidying up done in November. Here is a picture taken from an upstairs window. It shows nearly the entire width of the garden – there’s just a bit missing on the left. The white blobs are sleet – something that we have had quite a lot of recently.

Overview of garden in January 2009

Progress has been happening – my greenhouse is to be delivered next week. I have got a quote from my usual landscaping company for laying a base for the greenhouse. I am going to deviate from the plan and extend the solid paving around the back and sides instead of having stepping stones, because I think it will be more practical and easy to maintain. It will also be more expensive, but I think it will be worth it. My landscaping contractors will lay the cable from the greenhouse to the house, and then I just have to get an electrician to wire it up to a spur in the kitchen. The landscaper recommends burying the cable to a depth of one foot, so that’s not as much digging as I had thought. However, I intend to dig the trench deeper than that if I can be bothered and if weather permits.

Today I went out into the garden for the first time since before Christmas, apart from to empty the compost bowl. I swept the garage in preparation for the arrival of the greenhouse, and as an experiment, tried to dig a bit more of the trench. I found that once I had cracked the frozen inch or so at the surface, it was quite easy to dig out the soil, so that’s quite good news. I also think I am acclimatising to the extreme cold. Although my fingers went slightly numb, it wasn’t too bad – and I know it was still cold because there was ice and frost on the ground, and my pond was frozen over (although I found that the ice wasn’t thick enough for me to skate on).

My fence has been damaged.

Fence damaged by unknown assailant

It looks as if the damage was done by something from next door’s garden. It’s a bit puzzling, because I would have thought an animal would have attacked the fence a bit lower down. Next door’s shed (you can see the roof of it behind the fence) is only about six inches from my fence, so it must be a long, thin animal. Maybe the fence was head-butted by a grass snake. The panel is replaceable, but for now I will repair it with some bits of wood over the gap.