Not target-driven
Last week one of my students kindly gave me a fuchsia as a leaving present. She is Alice Hoffman (the fuchsia, not the student).
Fuchsia Alice Hoffman
Fortunately I am not target-driven so I thought, “What a lovely fuchsia. It’s a long time since I’ve had one of those”. I did not feel anxious about the effects on my pot reduction target.
However, I thought that today, after a lot of rain, it would be a good time to do some planting and thus reduce the pots anyway. I planted five of my seven pots of black grass (Ophiopogon Nigrescens) in front of the pyracantha. I like the black grass because it is an unusual plant, but I haven’t really decided what the best thing to do with it is. I thought that next to the pyracantha it might contrast well with the orange berries. I don’t know how well it will get on in this position because there isn’t much light, but I still have two pots left to plant somewhere else if this turns out to be a bad location.
Ophiopogon Nigrescens in front of the pyracantha
And then I thought I should take advantage of the relatively untapped resource of the front garden. I planted a euonymus between the hibiscus and the dead passion flower.
Euonymus fortunei Blondy
So that is a gain of one pot and a loss of six. This is 107 pots, down from 145 initially, a reduction of 26.2%.
Since my last post I have not done as much gardening as I have been used to, because recently it has started raining sometimes. My main job has been moving soil from the new lawn area to the areas to the left and rear of the new lawn to level the ground. I intend to leave myself with a nice neat cuboid shaped hole which will allow me to calculate the volume of soil I need to order to fill it. The ground levelling is a good rehearsal for the lawn project. For planting shrubs, the soil does not need to be dead level because a few small bumps and hollows won’t show. The lawn will be less tolerant. I have been sawing Leylandii branches into small lengths – about 10 cm long – and hammering them into the ground until their tops are level with the lawn edging. The books say you should use pegs and have a mark on the peg that is a few centimetres from the top, and get that mark level with the soil, but I don’t want to do that because I want to put the tarpaulin back on the ground when I have finished and not have it tear when it gets caught on a peg. It also seems to me to be an over elaborate method. The only advantage as far as I can tell is that it is easier to find the pegs again if the tops are not level with the soil. But I know where I put the markers because I am using a grid spacing equal to the length of my spirit level. And I don’t really mind if I lose a marker or two, as they will just rot down into the soil.