Helen's Garden Renovation Project

The magnolia in a pot still hasn’t died and is flowering again. It has only four flowers this year, but I am not complaining. I am just glad that it survived the hard winter.

One of four flowers from the magnolia growing in a pot

We have had an exceptionally long period without rain. I haven’t been able to do as much gardening as I would like because I have been busy with other things, but I have been keeping the pots weeded and well watered. They will get their late spring dose of vine weevil killer at the beginning of May. It will be lovely when I finally get the pond and lawn constructed and I can at last plant my potted plants in open ground, so they will need less feeding and no de-weevilling.

With the sudden change to dry and slightly warm weather, I have been spending a lot of time in the garden this week. I have finished breaking up the concrete foundation into manageable pieces. The chunks that I had before I did this were too heavy to lift safely, which was a nuisance. So I broke them up into two. Each chunk probably weighs about 5 – 7 kg, which is easily manageable. I now need to get all the fragments of concrete off the lawn so I can mow it without damaging the mower blade.

I also rearranged my pots. I had put some near the pond for the winter, thinking that I would get the landscaping works done in January, but I had to move them because the plants got their first feed on Monday morning, and it would have been very bad to have let the run-off from the fertiliser drip into the pond. I don’t think the newts would enjoy vine weevil killer either, which is what the plants can look forward to getting at the end of the month.

The current arrangement of tarpaulins

I saw my first brimstone butterfly on 10 April 2010, but not in my garden. It was fluttering above the junction of the A3 and the M25. I think that’s quite late in the year for a first sighting, but I am not surprised about this.

After last week’s sunshine bonanza, we have had a week of water. I managed to get out on Friday to tidy up a bit. I replaced the tarpaulin in the middle left of the garden with a bigger one and used the original tarpaulin to put on top of the area in the centre, where the viburnum used to be. I couldn’t lay them out very neatly because it was windy and they kept billowing out when I tried to fold them. I have also stacked up some of the chunks of path foundation out of the way (see the pile at the right-hand edge of the picture). I need to chop some of them up with my pickaxe because they are so very heavy to lift.

Deployment of another tarpaulin

I still have not seen a single cat in my garden. I found some droppings in the middle of the path of the cat repeller a week ago, but I think they were from a fox. The battery hasn’t run down yet, despite me forgetting to turn off the device on the day Graham the window cleaner visited.