The communal landscaping project
This weekend I was dragged away from the Garden Renovation Project to help with planting the new landscaping for the communal area shared by my neighbours and me. When I woke up at half past five, my heart sank because I could hear heavy rain. However, by nine o’clock the rain was over and the sun was out. Susie set out the plants. Here is a picture of one of the three areas that we planted.
Since I had saved some time by sorting the plants out yesterday according to where they were going to go, Susie and I planted the smallest area together and Susie took a picture of me looking pleased with myself. Then, as previously agreed, she went home and left us to it.
At half past ten the enthusiastic members of the working party arrived and we got on with the job. Susie had told me that there were 61 plants, and that at the rate of two minutes per plant, this would take two people just over an hour. Sadly, the assumption of two minutes to plant a plant was wildly optimistic. For one thing, I struck concrete at one point, and ended up levering out a kerbstone with a crowbar. This took a good few minutes. Some of the holes were hard to dig because tree roots were in the way. Some of them were hard to dig because of bricks in the way. Very few of them were easy to dig. There was also the problem of trying to get the levels right. There was a layer of bark on top of the soil and in some places it was three inches thick. It was hard to work out how deep to dig the hole to get the plant at the right level. And of course, it was a messy business scraping aside the bark and then putting it back. One thing which we were unable to work out was how we were supposed to get root-balls whose total volume must have come to some 300 litres, plus 800 litres of compost, into the soil without raising the soil level significantly. Perhaps that can be my next gardening maths problem.
At half past twelve I had to leave the site, but at this stage we still had over twenty plants still to plant. We had planted nearly all the biggest ones, so we were more than two-thirds of the way through, but this was still slippage on a massive scale. Fortunately, my neighbours managed to plant all the rest of the plants during the day, and no one so far has glared at me for disappearing off early.
I have never attempted any planting on this scale before, and I have learned the following lessons from the experience:
(1) If possible, dig out all the rubble from the site yourself. Do not pay anyone else to do it because they probably won’t. If you cannot remove it all yourself and have to pay someone, follow behind their rotavator or mini-digger with a fork and throw all the rubble into the back of their truck.
(2) Do not accept any planting commissions that are near a tree that is over 40 foot high, especially if it has a Tree Preservation Order (TPO) on it. If it has not got a TPO on it, you will have a tough time cutting through all the roots. If it has a TPO on it you will not be allowed to cut through any roots that are thicker than your forearm, so you will have to keep digging until you find a large enough gap to put your plant in.
(3) Do not put bark all over the area before planting things. This is just plain silly.
(4) If there is bark all over the area, you can make the job tidier by first removing bark from the place you want to plant, and heaping up the soil from the hole onto an empty bag of compost.
(5) Do not underestimate the physical task of lifting pots, shovelling earth and so on. If you are not used to it, three hours is a long time to spend planting things. Chocolate biscuits are a great help, however.
(6) The easiest way to improve soil quality is to spread a thin layer of compost across the surface of the soil (see comment 3) and let the worms do the digging for you. It is quite hard to use enough compost if you just put some into the bottom of the planting hole, because you still have to get all the soil you dug out back into the hole, as well as the plant, and there just isn’t enough space.
Today (Sunday) began with torrential snow. Our plants were covered.
However, the snow didn’t last long. And all the plants are very hardy.