Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Today I decided to plant my two baby thuja and the great big euonymus, thus completing the hedge apart from the gap I left last time, which I will fill later. This is what the fence looked like before I started digging:

Then I planted my two baby thuja, which was a walk in the park after planting the big ones. And then I planted my biggest euonymus. Getting it out of the pot was hard, mainly because the pot was even heavier than the plant. I had some reservations about planting the euonymus. I am concerned that there may not, really, be room for it there. And also, it didn’t look 100% healthy. It has white blotches on the leaves and I think it has had whitefly. But I think that it probably just doesn’t like being in a pot. So I gave it lots of fertiliser, and lots of water, and maybe next month I will spray it with something and see if it cheers up.

The new thuja are so small compared with the others. I hope they manage to hold their own. At least they will get enough light. I will have to make sure that I give them, and the euonymus, plenty of water.

Talking of water, the Met Office has changed its prediction for May. It’s now giving the dry weather to the north, and allocating the rain to the south. While I admit we need the rain, I was getting used to this new concept of being able to do some gardening whenever I felt like it. So I think the pond will probably stay unpainted, and I will go back to Plan A: plant as many things as possible.

I now have 137 pots. This is a reduction of 5.5%. Progress is happening.

Today I decided to go for it and plant the six thuja in the trench despite the fact that hot weather was forecast. As I learned last autumn, planting trees of that size is no joke. As last autumn, I got better at it as I went along, but it was still a very long job. In the process I lost my trowel. I think I may have buried it while planting. I am afraid it will just have to stay there because there is no way I am digging the plants up again to look for it. It was part of my comprehensive 21st birthday toolkit present from my parents, and has had a long and productive life. May it rust in peace.

The observant reader will notice that there is a gap in the hedge in the following picture. This is because I didn’t dig the trench quite wide enough. Rather than doing some more digging, I decided that I would plant five of the thuja and put the sixth one in later, as I was getting quite tired and I wanted to make sure I finished the job. In fact, I didn’t quite manage to fill the gaps with soil up to the required level, but this was not such a bad thing because I could then fill up the hollows with water and thus give the trees a really good soaking.

Leylandii leaves are well known for causing a rash on contact with exposed skin. I had been wondering whether thuja leaves are just as bad. After today’s session, I think I can say, “Not quite.” I have red mottling all up both arms, but it doesn’t itch or feel sore.

I now have 140 pots – a reduction of 3.4%. And there is a lot more space on my patio now.

It’s been such a lot of work, but just when I was thinking I would never finish removing the Leylandii roots, I suddenly did.

I am now ready to plant the six thuja in the trench. This is not something I expect to complete in one session, but you never know. I could give it a go tomorrow.

The warm, dry, sunny weather continues. I really cannot remember when it last rained. This is good in that I can take every opportunity I have to work in the garden, but bad in that I have to do such a lot of watering. I have counted my pots, not including the bulbs in the side passage which I am leaving to their own devices. I have 145 pots. My aim is to reduce this by 50% by the end of June.

The weather forecast is for more dry weather well into mid-May. This has caused me to think again about my pond plans. If May is hot and dry, then the advantage of planting in May rather than, say, June or July, is reduced. Perhaps I will paint the pond in May instead of July, even though this will mean less planting progress (because I will have less time to do the planting). After all, we may have a very rainy summer to follow this exceptionally dry spring. And it would be nice to get the tarpaulin off the pond and have some water and plants in it instead.

Today is the first anniversary of Dave’s death, and I came home from work an hour early and planted a rhododendron. It is the one that my neighbours Nick and Mel kindly gave me when they learned that he had died.

I had already prepared the site by digging a hole of the right size, and so it didn’t take me long to plant it.

And now it can get on with flowering. I think I need a stone frog ornament to put next to it, although I realise that not everyone would agree.

For love is eternal. And those we love shall be with us throughout all eternity.

This morning I watered all my potted plants because it has been so dry and even quite hot. I scooped the water out of the shallow pond to use for watering, and that was when I noticed that the newts had moved in. Now it says quite explicitly in the Plan that the newts are to use the deep, raised pond and the shallow pond is for the frogs. To be fair, I haven’t put up the warning notices or the CCTV cameras yet, but something tells me that I am not going to be able to enforce my amphibian apartheid, and the newts are going to eat all the frogspawn every spring as usual.

On the subject of gardening fails, my beautiful little hellbores that I planted from seeds from Chiltern Seeds have disappeared. There was a bit of slime in the pot, so I think that slugs or snails got them. I still have plenty of seeds left in the packet, but of course they may not germinate until next spring, which is a long time to wait. The instructions say that I should keep them at 0C for 6 weeks, so I put them in the fridge last time, but perhaps this time I will try the deep freeze in the hope that they will be tricked into germinating in the middle of summer. And I will protect them from the slugs and snails until they are big and strong.

However, the magnolia is not a fail. Oh no. And I really do not know which picture is the best so here are three of them.