Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Until now, I have been writing plant names on white plastic labels in pencil. This is fine up to a point, but the writing eventually fades or washes off, and then if the plant dies I don’t know what it was before it died. So I bought a Brother GL-200 plant labelling machine.

Plant labeller with adaptor and sample output

It is very easy to use. Although it’s obviously not as quick as scribbling on the label with pencil, it’s still quite quick. It also offers flexibility in typeface and size of type. The only thing I would suggest to improve it would be an RHS-approved spell checker (see sample label). After I printed off “Campanula Portenschlagiana” I found that this was not going to fit on a label stick, so I changed to narrow type instead. This is perfectly readable and saves tape, so I have done it with shorter names too.

Some of my plant labels printed this morning

I bought the plant labeller from Labelzone because they offered the cheapest price I could find, and they had a UK address and no obvious spelling mistakes on their site, so looked respectable. They delivered exactly what I’d ordered very quickly, so definitely deserve a mention on my blog. Also deserving of a mention is Battery Logic, where I bought eight Uniross Hybrio rechargeable AAA batteries. Although I have an adaptor for the plant labeller, the batteries enable me to use the labeller where there isn’t a convenient plug point, and will save anything stored in the memory. I ordered the batteries on Thursday afternoon and got them on Friday, which was incredibly good.

This morning it rained (thanks again, Met Office, for your summer predictions) and so I got some labels printed. I think I am going to use all the tape that came with the machine, so it’s a good thing I bought a spare cartridge as well. It’s important to use the Chain Print function when printing out a lot of labels or the printer wastes a lot of tape by leaving large gaps between each label.

My prediction about the water pistol in my last entry has proved to be true: the cats now run away as soon as I open the window. Next, they will see me at the window, and as soon as I move away they will know I’ve gone to get the key, and will have run away before I even get as far as opening the window.

I don’t know why I keep paying attention to what the Met Office says any more. They said we were going to have a milder than average winter, and everything froze solid in January and February. Then they’ve said we are going to have a hot and dry summer. Ever since the heatwave it’s rained almost every day.

The rain has been helpful in a way because I haven’t had to do much watering. I would say that I haven’t had to do any watering, but that’s not quite true. A few days ago, after doing no watering at all, I discovered that my buddleia and two of my cornuses (all in pots) were drooping. One of the cornuses looked as if it was about to cark it, but I watered it, and it was looking much better the next day. I decided to take some cornus cuttings as a backup. I am not much good at taking cuttings, apart from pelargonium cuttings, but sometimes I succeed.

I have been able to snatch odd moments in the garden in between showers and thunderstorms. In fact, I managed three hours on Friday morning, and then had the satisfaction of watching it tip it down in the afternoon. However, I have not managed to make much renovation progress. It’s all about trying to keep the weeds from taking over and keeping everything in check. Now that I have weeded all my plant pots, the plants are taking advantage of the extra space and some could do with bigger pots. I pruned the wisteria. I know this isn’t supposed to happen until late summer, but I expect that the chap who invented that rule didn’t have a wisteria that had wrapped itself around a drainpipe in the hope of pulling it off the wall. (What is it with wisterias and drainpipes? Why can’t they just accept one another and live in peace?)

My friend Aubrey has given me a water pistol for the cats. Not having had a mis-spent youth, I wasn’t sure how to use it, but it didn’t take me long to work it out. You fill the reservoir with water and then use the pump to build up the pressure. You have to use the pump between each shot. The spray won’t go right to the end of the garden, but it will certainly go about halfway. To my great disappointment, I have not yet got a single cat. They obviously associate with children who are having a mis-spent youth and know exactly what I am pointing at them. Eventually I won’t need the pistol at all, and I will just have to open a window to make them run away.

I have now come to the end of my summer holiday-at-home and what a week it has been. I have spent an average of about two and a half hours in the garden every day and it has been glorious. My arms are a tasteful brown colour and I have no sunburn, which is just as well, because otherwise when I returned to work (the Health Promotion Resource Library) next week, I would have to give myself a leaflet.

As previously announced, the willowherb wins the Annual Willowherb Elimination Stakes trophy for the thirteenth successive year. However, I would like to draw your attention to the following:

Pots stacked tidily in side alley by sheds instead of being randomly scattered throughout the garden

Also note the very tidily arranged Portable Herbaceous Border on a neatly swept patio.

Portable Herbaceous Border after weeding and tidying

And finally a view of the end of the garden. All right, so it would be greatly improved if I moved the compost bins and the bags of organic compost, but at least there are some pretty plants there enjoying the sunshine. The red flowers are from the Very Badly Taken Pelargonium Cuttings, which are mostly still in their pots because I don’t know where to plant them.

Flowers and compost bins

I said I wasn’t going to prune the apple trees, and I didn’t, but I think I really need to. This one is Charles Ross, and he is not in great shape. I shall have to find out when and how to do it. The green stuff underneath is marjoram. I was going to trim that back, and I did – a bit. You can see the hellebore at the bottom left of the picture. Before I trimmed back some of the marjoram, you wouldn’t have been able to.

Charles Ross, an apple tree in need of pruning

So that’s my holiday over, and the Gardening Renovation Project will now return to normal. Over the next two months I will be continuing to fight the willowherb and other weeds. I will finish filling in the old pond, and move the compost bins to their final destinations. Then I will get the plan out and work out exactly where the new lawn and pond are going to go, so I can find out how much path I need to take up.

The heatwave carried on today, and so did I. I drilled holes in the bottoms of seven big square planters and repotted thuja in two of them. Well, it’s a start. I also continued to tidy up the Portable Herbaceous Border and it’s looking much better. I’ll take a photo when I’ve finished. In the meantime, here is a picture of the left hand edge of my garden. Between the fence and the path there is just enough soil for plants to get in. Usually it’s weeds, but right now there is a good sized colony of lychnis, which is a grey-leaved plant with bright magenta flowers. I will weed this edge by hand rather than use glyphosate, because a line of lychnis by the fence would be absolutely lovely.

Lychnis by the fence and majoram on the right, in bright sunshine

The cats are still causing me problems. I think people should need planning permission to keep a cat. After all, if I decided to run a chip-making factory from my home, the Council would close me down if the neighbours didn’t like the smell. And the messes the cats leave behind smell far worse than chips. One or two cats would be all right (although I’d prefer none at all) but I think there are six or seven using my garden as a toilet at the moment. Once the density of cats exceeds, say, one cat per 1000 square metres, the Council should refuse permission for anyone in the area to acquire any more cats, or anyone to bring a cat when they move into the area.

I have used two supposed cat repellents: Get Off, which consists of green crystals with a soapy smell, and something else, which consists of small grey pellets which smell of garlic. I suppose that to test them properly I should set aside two areas of bare earth, apply a cat repellent to one patch and not the other, and count the number of little piles left in each area the next day. But I can’t be bothered to do that, and anyway my criteria for success are very stringent: no piles of any size at all, ever! It’s possible that the repellents may reduce the number of piles by half, for all I know, but that’s not good enough.

The only thing that has consistently worked for keeping the cats away is a physical barrier. For example, compost bags sewn together, or old pond liner, weighted down with rubble.

My attempts to keep the cats from fouling the area where the old pond was

The cats then tend to foul just under the edge if they can peel it back, or on top of the barrier at the edge, but this is much less than if they had access to the whole area. I tried leaving marjoram trimmings in a bare area (see the front left of the picture), thinking that the smell might put the cats off, but no – they just pooed right next to it.

Around the thuja, I have also used a plastic barrier, but I have also added in a few prunings from my neighbours’ shrubs, some of which are spiny. (Yes, I know that the prunings legally belong to my neighbours, but I feel confident that they aren’t expecting me to give them back). I think that when I start planting the area, my best hope will be spiny shrub cuttings, as there will be only small areas of soil between the plants.

My attempts to keep the cats away from the thuja

With the decrease in available toilet space, the cats now poo on my lawn, or on top of my stepping stones in between the compost bins. This is still annoying, but at least it is easy to clear up.

As an alternative to requiring planning permission to keep a cat, another way of stopping the nuisance is to require all cat owners to feed their cats gold pellets daily. This would encourage owners to try to get their cats to do their business in their litter trays, but if the cats still preferred to perform their functions elsewhere, at least the garden owners would get automatic compensation for the unpleasantness.

And finally… I have officially lost the Annual Willowherb Elimination Stakes once again. I found at least two willowherb plants with fluffy seed heads today. I will still keep going because the fewer seeds the better, but the trophy is once again with the willowherb. Maybe next year my luck will change.