Helen's Garden Renovation Project

And now I am stalking the apple trees, ready to pounce the minute they go to sleep. While I am waiting, this is a good time to take stock of what I have achieved so far.

The hedge at the back is now about two feet taller than the fence at its highest point. I expect it to have grown another two feet by this time next year, and of course it should also thicken out considerably.

Behind the pond are stacked 20 bags of organic compost from The Compost Centre, ready for my autumn/winter planting. If you are wondering why I have put them around the Pieris, it is because the Pieris is a big plant in a lightweight pot, and it keeps getting blown over. The compost should put a stop to that.

The raised pond still contains only a dribble of water. This is because it has hardly rained at all since I painted it. The shallow pond also contains only a dribble of water. This is because I gave it a thorough cleaning after painting the render around the edge, so I could remove all loose bits of mortar and mortar dust. This involved also removing all the water that was in there at the time, in case it had lime in it.

Over to the right hand side of the garden, the lawn looks surprisingly verdant, as if it hopes that I will decide it would be a shame to dig it up and re-seed it. Nice try, lawn.

And the apple trees are still very leafy. My current estimate of digging up time is about a month from now, so 13th November.

Today I finished the hedge. Good.

It didn’t take me long to slot in the final tree because I got better at planting large things with practice. Also today I dished out the vine weevil killer. I used to dose every plant, but that takes such a long time and is so expensive, so this time I planned to dose only the most valuable plants (i.e. the biggest ones, and ones that I only have one of) and the most vulnerable (i.e. the euonymus and the primulas). I then did as many plants as possible with what I had left over. I used two 750ml bottles instead of five, so that’s an improvement.

Also today I did a lot of tidying up. It’s easy to clear away the lime tree flowers and dead leaves while everything is as dry as dust, but when the rain comes, as one day it surely will, they will turn to sludge and it will be much less pleasant to dispose of them.

I think the next thing I need to do is to take up the rest of the path on the left hand side. It will be easier to do this before I plant things in that area, and also I will be able to see more clearly what space is available and therefore work out what to do with it.

Number of pots = 135. Percentage reduction so far = 6.9%

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.

It’s definitely time to start planting. The major job is to get the six big thuja into the ground instead of the Leylandii. I have now removed all but one of the Leylandii, and have partly dug up the remaining one. I took the following picture last week, when I made a lot of progress because I took the week off work and it didn’t rain.

The price for the lack of rain is that I have to water all my plants. I have been scooping out the water out of the shallow pond, which will all have to come out because I haven’t sealed the mortar yet, and the chemicals in the water might hurt the frogs. They probably won’t hurt the plants, though.

I was going to paint the pond last week, but I was still unsure about whether it was dry enough yet, as some more water got in and it had black pigment in it. I decided that digging up the Leylandii was more urgent, and it won’t do the pond any harm if it is left until June before it gets painted. So the tarpaulin stays on. You can see it in the foreground of the picture above. I have cut a triangular piece of tarpaulin and hemmed it to stop it fraying, so it is easy to put over the pond and keep in place.

Although the thuja planting is the biggest and most important job, planting some of the smaller plants is also worth doing because it reduces the amount of watering and feeding I have to do. I have removed all the rubble from the area near the camellia and have started on the underplanting. I am going to have some of: viola, primula, aquilegia, geranium sangineum, hellebore and probably honesty, if I recognise the emerging seedlings correctly.

And finally, here is a preview of the magnolia. We may have some overnight frosts in the next few days, but if we don’t… oh wow!

Spring is here. The camellia certainly thinks so.

This means that the grass is going to start growing any minute, and weeds will appear in the patches of bare earth. And I am now having the busiest March for tutoring since 2008 – I am turning people down because I have no space until after the summer exams start. The most important job is still to remove the Leylandii, but I also need to make sure the rest of the garden is as little bother as possible while I carry on with Renovation. So I have cut a straight line across the new lawn, and covered the bare earth section with bits of pond liner and compost bags and a tarpaulin. That should stop any weeds until I have time to dig it over and sow some seed. This won’t be until the autumn at the earliest. Apart from mining the area for additional earth, I can leave it to its own devices until then. Fortunately I correctly chose this week to take off work. The forecast is for dry weather all week, so I hope to get a lot done.

I am carrying out my plan to shorten the middle tree and use it as a support to remove the other two trees. I have removed one of the trees using the same method as I did a few weeks ago, and this week I hope to remove the other two. Then I will still have some roots to dig out of the ground, but when that is done, it will be time to plant the thuja.

The magnolia which I dug up and stuck in a pot is still alive and is just beginning to open its flower buds. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it is looking like there will be an amazing show this year. I hope the frosts hold off.

I decided to try a new way of removing Leylandii, now that I am so experienced at digging up trees. Normally I cut through the trunk at about six feet above the ground so that the tree isn’t so tall and heavy. But I decided to remove the tree whole this time, mainly because the trunk is very thick and would be hard work to saw through while the tree was vertical. Firstly, on Friday I dug away the soil around the rootball and cut through all the small roots. This took two hours.

Then I tied the tree to the ones next to it, using two ropes. I sawed through the biggest roots, which took about half an hour, and then I gave the tree a little push to encourage it to fall in a direction where the greenhouse wasn’t.

Then I gradually paid out the top rope and let the tree continue to fall.

And finally I took a picture of myself standing next to the tree (and the intact greenhouse) after it had finished falling down.

Then I decided I had had enough of sawing through things, and did a bit of quiet weeding until it started raining. I think getting rid of a tree this size on your own is a bit like walking across hot coals – it looks as if it is very dangerous and scary, but actually it isn’t, as long as you understand some physics and have some good strong rope (rope probably less of an advantage for coal walking).

Mathematicians and scientists will have spotted a problem with my method for getting rid of four trees in this way. It requires at least n + 1 trees, where n is a positive integer, because you have to tie the tree you are removing to another tree. There will therefore be a problem with the implementation after I have removed three trees. However, the middle of the three remaining trees has a trunk division at an easy height to reach, so I will tie the two small upper trunks to the other trees, cut them off, and then remove the trees at each end, using the middle one as the support, and then I will dig up the middle one without the help of ropes because it will be short enough to do this under control.

No brimstone butterflies today. I think it was too damp and cloudy.

After my plants from Buckingham Nurseries arrived, I ordered some more plants from Burncoose Nurseries in Cornwall. Their plants were more expensive than those from Buckingham Nurseries (although bigger) but they do an excellent range of plants that are hard to get from anywhere else. I ordered an acca and a kalmia. The kalmia, together with the holly that I bought from Buckingham Nurseries, will replace the bay tree and will help shield the compost bins from view. I also ordered a skimmia to go in the side border. I wanted a female one because it does berries and because there are some male ones in the communal shrubbery on the other side of the road, and I thought it was a bit of a waste having male skimmias if there weren’t any female ones for them to have berries with.

Last Friday my package arrived, and I was very pleased it was so quick, as the website had said the kalmia was out of stock. But then I pulled out the delivery note, and saw that the package apparently contained three Coronilla plants for someone in Whitby with a very similar surname to mine. The courier was long gone, and I realised that I had to unpack the parcel, whatever it contained, because otherwise the plants would die. So I unpacked it and it did indeed contain three Coronillas.

Burncoose Nurseries kindly let me keep the Coronillas, which was sensible because I don’t think they would have been very healthy after having two journeys in a cardboard box, and so I had to look them up on the Internet because I had never heard of them. Apparently it’s a very nice plant, which flowers a lot, but can be susceptible to a very cold winter. I think I will plant one of them in my front garden, by the house wall, where it will get lots of sun and a bit of frost protection. They don’t live very long even if they don’t get frozen to death, so I may take some cuttings in the summer if I decide I like it. But by then the acca may well be big enough to take up all the available space itself, so I may not want to plant a replacement coronilla. Anyway, events like this are why it is difficult to work out a planting plan.

Burncoose Nurseries sent out my proper order straight away, and here is a picture of my new plants. I have given one of the coronillas to my friend Sharon (whose husband Graham helped me demolish the last lot of Leylandii).

The first part of the week has been quite dull and rainy, although I haven’t minded because I have been working and not gardening. This morning, however, gave us some abundant sunshine, and some warmth, and it was the most glorious thing to be out there, savaging the Leylandii.

I looked under the tarpaulin to see how much water was in the pond, and it was bone dry, despite the fact that it rained nearly all day yesterday, and has been raining a lot on other days too. This is brilliant news because it means that either the concrete has finished curing and giving off water, or I have found a more effective way of keeping the rain out. And either of those is good. I shall give it another two weeks, and if there is still no water in the pond, I may dare to hope that it is time to give it some more coats of pond paint.

The shallow pond has filled up a lot. And this morning, for the first time, I saw dead frogs on the road. I don’t really want them to spawn in the shallow pond because I need to seal the concrete and remove any concrete debris that has fallen in it first. If they do, I will put the spawn in the temporary pond, and the newts will eat it, and that will be very sad but no sadder than the frogs getting run over.

Spring has come. The evidence is as follows:

The pink pulmonaria has been in flower for at least a couple of weeks, but the blue pulmonaria hasn’t quite got going yet.

My earliest rhododendron is gorgeous this year because there has been no frost since its buds started opening.

I saw my first brimstone butterfly.

I sowed some hellebore seeds from Chiltern Seeds last year. They wanted to be left for a certain number of weeks at a complicated temperature, so I put them in the fridge and then took them out, but nothing happened, so I put them outside, with the pot still inside a plastic bag, and when I looked at them this morning, there were two seedlings.

So it is definitely spring.

Apart from monitoring the seasons, I went to the dump with some rubble, and chopped some more bits off the Leylandii. When the soil dries out a bit more I am now ready to dig the first one up.

We have had even more rain since my last post. Today I lifted the tarpaulin off part of the pond and scooped out a bucketful of water from the centre of the pond. There was too much to mop up with newspapers, as I had originally planned to do. But the good news is that the water was much less black than it has been. I suppose I will have to wait until the water is completely clean before I can declare the pond has finished drying out and that it is time to recoat the concrete. I still have no idea how long that will be. But at least things are going the right way.

Meanwhile, we had a dry day yesterday and last night, so this morning was a reasonable day for gardening. I cut some bits off the Leylandii, shredded them and put them in my council garden waste bags. I also cut some bits off the bay tree and shredded them, but I kept the shreddings for my compost bin – I don’t want to put too much Leylandii in my compost in case it makes it too acidic.

These days I am doing a lot of staring at the garden and wondering what to do with it. I think one thing that is important is to work out where my main routes are. For example, how do I get to the large blue conifer at the bottom left of the garden? And how will I access my apple trees and vegetable plots? I don’t want to be walking across the lawn too much, although the occasional journey won’t matter.

I also realise that the view from the kitchen window is absolutely crucial. This is what I have at the moment:

And this is a higher-resolution picture of part of the view:

As you can see, there is a lot of rubble there at the moment. The bay tree still just about hides the compost bins from view. The compost bins are not that ugly, but I prefer to have plants in front of them, and I will have to work out where I can put them and still have a path leading to the compost bins. The bay tree, as I said earlier, is going because it is right where I want to put the path.

The rubble piles are decreasing, as I have been to the local tip twice since the landscaping work was done. It is best to go there early as there is no queue. There were also two nice young men working there, whose eyes lit up at the sight of a lady unloading her car into the rubble bin and rushed over to compete for the privilege of lifting the biggest piece out of the boot. I was grateful, as it is a lot easier to lift heavy things into the boot than it is to lift them out again. (This is simple physics – the hardest part of lifting a heavy thing is when your arms are outstretched. When you put the heavy thing into the boot, you are controlling its descent downwards, which is not very hard. When you lift it out, you have to lift it upwards with your arms stretched out, which is harder). I will have to go a few more times when I take up the path at the left hand side of the garden.

The Met Office is promising us a dry spell after half term, so I am hoping it is right. If so, I will carry on with soil shifting and I will dig out the Leylandii roots. And then it really will be time to start planting things.