Helen's Garden Renovation Project

We had lots and lots of rain but now it’s time for a dry spell, so I finished off planting the hedge.

The second row of four thuja plicata, all planted

I am now much better at planting big trees than I was last week. It was still hard work, but much less effort than last time. Yesterday I planted one tree in the morning, and the other two in the afternoon. I gave them a bag of compost each, and borrowed some soil from elsewhere to fill the hole. It is now apparent that I am going to need a lot of soil to get the level back up in this area. I need to take it from some area of the garden that isn’t relevant to the next phase of the work.

The Hedge Part 1 has grown well.

The first four thuja that I planted two years ago

As you can see, both hedges are just beginning to reach beyond the top of the fence. I found it strange that the trees kept in pots should grow just as fast as the trees planted in open ground. However, the trees in the pots are not yet pot-bound, so perhaps the restriction of the roots hasn’t had any effect yet. Also, the trees in pots probably got more light than the ones behind the greenhouse, which are hemmed in by the fences and the bay tree. And the trees in pots may have got more water, although I was careful to water the hedge whenever it was hot and dry for a few days at a time. I fed the trees in pots more than the hedge too.

These thoughts about the growth rate are not just of academic interest; I have to decide what to do about the middle section of the hedge. Although I would like to let the replacement trees grow a little bigger before I remove the middle four Leylandii, I am afraid I will not be able to plant them if they are 7 ft tall. I am thinking that the best thing to do would be to remove the Leylandii in March and then plant the six replacement thuja as soon as the ground is warm enough, before they have had a chance to grow any more.

I also now have to face my miscalculation about the number of thuja needed. You can see from the picture below that there is a big gap between the left-hand edge of the hedge and the blue conifer.

 The heavy rain and winds have not been good for my sedums. Poor things.

My sedums after being rained on a lot

Yesterday it rained.  A lot. Tomorrow it is forecast to rain again. A lot. So today I mowed the lawn and tried to plant the new hedge. I had to do a bit more digging first, but then I was ready to put the first tree in place. Then it started raining. I almost gave up, but then it stopped raining and the sky turned an innocent blue, so I went back to tree planting.

I found out that planting a tree of that size is non-trivial. It is so heavy, for a start! Then it has to be at the right distance from the other trees, the right distance from the fence, and the right level, vertically speaking. I tried to plant it in the orientation that would make the trunk look straightest. And it was jolly hard work. My legs were turning to jelly by the time I had finished. I stuck some bamboo canes around the tree to give it some gentle support, put my muddy spirit level away, and went indoors and wiped the mud off my tape measure. I was interested to see that the newly planted tree looks about as big as the four that I planted two years ago. I had thought that the trees in pots would grow more slowly than those in the ground, but I hadn’t measured the heights to check this. Maybe the extra food that the potted trees got made up for not having so much room to spread their roots about. This implies that it could be worth feeding the planted trees, in the summer at least.

The fifth thuja has just been planted.

And I still have nine more of these to plant! I need six thuja to go in place of the four remaining Leylandii, so I will plant three more this time. Then I will see how it looks and maybe plant more, and buy some more thuja to finish off the hedge next year. I really should have remembered that I was planting the thuja two feet apart when I bought them. If I were doing this project again, I would not grow the trees so big before planting them. I would perhaps buy small ones and grow them on for a year or two, but I wouldn’t let them get to five feet high before planting them.

At least I can have a nice rest tomorrow while the rain waters my tree for me.

The weather is noticeably cooler and the days are equally noticeably shorter. I fed my plants a few days ago. I may make that the last feed of the season, or they may get another one at the end of September. I have been starting to tidy up now that growth has slowed down. If I am lucky my garden will look tidy for about a month, and then the leaves and the beech nuts will start to come down in force.

I have removed the second tree completely, and a nice tree surgeon came round to trim the hedges. I trimmed back some of the jungle at the left hand edge of the garden as well.

Preparation for the second instalment of the new hedge

You may notice that the number of the plants on the blue tarpaulin has decreased significantly. This is not because they have all died, but because I have started to move them out of the way of the planned works.

Space made for winter storage of plants

The plants are now sitting between the bay tree and the greenhouse. I have started to dig up some turf, which I shall bury somewhere that won’t be dug up imminently so it can rot down. I have put some of the path foundation blocks on the bare earth and I will use this space to store more plants. The essential thing is to get them out of the way when the landscapers are busy building the pond and cutting up the patio. And it’s looking as if I may just about be able to do it, given that the plants need less growth space in winter.

The next job will be to plant the thuja in the gap between the four remaining Leylandii and the blue conifer. I will dig in plenty of compost. The first set of four thuja that I planted two years ago are now almost level with the top of the fence.

We have sunshine and showers forecast for the Bank Holiday weekend. Since it was doing sunshine this morning I decided it was time to start cutting bits off the two Leylandii trees that I am going to remove this autumn. They are at the left of the existing hedge. The job needs doing now because the other Leylandii need a trim, and it seems pointless to trim the two trees that I am going to remove. I intelligently ate a substantial piece of cake first to make sure I had enough fuel to complete the job.

The two left hand Leylandii will soon be removed

You can’t see all the branches that I removed in this picture, but I stacked them on the tarpaulin and there were a lot of them. I have made a start on shredding them, but this will be a two-hour job at least. Then I will have to dig up the roots. And then call in a tree surgeon to trim the remaining trees, all four of them. And then plant the new trees. I don’t know exactly how many I can fit in the space left, but at two feet apart, it should be about six.

I am pleased to announce that I did get an A star in my GCSE biology, despite not knowing how the plants under the tarpaulin were getting their carbon dioxide. I think there is nothing wrong with the difficulty of GCSEs – it’s just that the grade boundaries are very low. For Paper 2 in GCSE Biology, you only needed to get 69% to get an A star. And I don’t think any of the questions were unfair, so why have such a low boundary for the highest grade possible?

After the heavy rain on Sunday and Tuesday, we have had another gorgeous warm October day, which seems all wrong given that the world is going through the biggest crisis that many of us have ever known. Last time we had a really big stock market crash, in 1987, loads of trees blew down at about the same time. I am hoping that there won’t be a repeat of that because I have put a lot of hard work into planting these thuja.

First lot of thuja planted

When I calculated how many thuja I would need, I decided that I needed the same number as the leylandii (10) plus two extra to make the hedge a bit longer, and therefore I bought 14, to include two spares. However, what I forgot to check was the spacing of my leylandii. I planted them (correctly) 2.5 feet apart, but thuja want to be 2 feet apart. So my four leylandii really needed to be replaced by five thuja. Actually, I decided to only plant four at this time because the fifth one might struggle a bit, being very close to a well-established leylandii, but it looks like I will need all 14 of my thuja. I just hope that they perform better than my HBOS shares.

I used my final bag of organic compost in planting the thuja. I put some in the planting hole, and spread the rest around the area, making sure that it didn’t touch any of the plants. My neighbour said that when she used the same compost, she got a load of mushrooms, even though it was May. If I get a good crop, I will take some photos.

My very badly taken pelargonium cuttings haven’t died yet.

I have lost count of how long I have spent digging this hole, but I have put in a stint every day that I haven’t been out doing my NHS job for the past two weeks, because it just hasn’t rained except when I have been working at the NHS. I think I have done about ten sessions. At 400 calories an hour, and about one and a half hours per session, that comes to about 6000 calories. The cake was 4000 calories, and I’ve eaten about 90% of it, so the project was funded by 2400 calories from my internal reserves. That equates to about 2/3 lb of fat. So here is a picture of me looking pleased about the hole, but not discernibly thinner.

Me in conifer hole

My back started to give me a few twinges last night, but this morning was forecast to be fine, while tomorrow there is a weather warning for huge amounts of rain. So I took some ibuprofen and finished the job. Here is a picture of the hole without me in it. I hadn’t quite finished digging when I took the photograph – there were a few roots to be dug out at the far end – but I took the photograph because I needed a rest.

Hole dug for new conifers

After that I tipped in one and a half bags of organic compost from The Compost Centre, tipped in some more soil, and put in another bag of compost. The compost is certainly organic. It was also very wet and slimy because I had left the bags outside for six months and they had ventilation holes punched in them so the water got in. I tipped in some more soil and decided that was enough for now. It is quite an easy job filling the hole in again, partly because I’m moving the soil downwards from the heap to the hole so am not working against gravity. However, I did find myself getting quite warm with the work, which is just as well because the temperature is getting very much more autumnal now.

In between all this manual labour, I have been doing some thinking about the hedge. My little thuja plants are about 3 ft tall, which is half the height of the fence. If they grow at a rate of 2 ft a year, which I think is a reasonable estimate, it will take them four and a half years to get to be 12 ft, and probably a few more years to get nice and bushy so they form a proper screen. If I replace the rest of the hedge in two phases, one part next autumn and the final part the autumn after, I will then be going for two to three years with hardly any screening from the hedge. But if I leave the Leylandii in place for longer than two years, the trees will grow that much bigger and may be too big for me to remove safely myself, and the thuja will be bigger and more difficult to plant too. I may compromise by removing the left-hand end of the hedge next autumn, but waiting a little longer before removing the middle.

The past two weeks have been exceptionally fine and sunny, with hardly any rain. I have had six stints at the conifer excavation site, each lasting about one and a half hours, and after all this work I have removed two of the trunks. After cutting through the biggest roots, I pushed the tree over in several directions until the rest of the roots snapped or were exposed enough for me to see them and snip through them.

Removal of first conifer

It is then necessary to dig a bit deeper to remove the snapped off roots to enough depth to give the new resident of the hole plenty of room to grow. Well, probably it is. I’m not taking any chances, as I do not intend to be replacing the next lot of conifers.

Roots exposed after Saturday's stint of digging

I took the two photographs above yesterday, but this morning I made some more progress. I dug up the conifer next to the one I took out on Saturday. This involved sawing through one root with my lovely chipboard saw, which was a Christmas present from my parents in 1987. I did not use the scary Alligator because it was only about nine o’clock on Sunday morning and I thought it might be a bit noisy, and I didn’t want to get mud in its teeth from the dirty root, not because I was too scared of it. It’s a perfectly safe tool if used sensibly.

I have given the potted plants their third dose of Wilkinson’s Wonder Gro, so that should keep them quiet until March. I think I will have to give them some more Vine Weevil killer too as it is only supposed to last for four months. Perhaps I can do that on Monday, which is forecast to be another fine day. It will make a change from digging.

On Friday I took some cuttings of my pelargoniums very badly. According to Gardeners’ World shown that very evening, I should use a knife sharp enough to dig into my thumbnail, choose non-flowering stems, and put the cuttings round the edge of a pot, using compost with bits of grit in it. Instead, I snapped the cuttings off without using any weapons, not caring about whether the break was particularly near a nodule in the stem or not, pulled off the lower leaves, and put them in B&Q stem and cutting compost, on special offer last spring. I put each one in a separate pot. Out of my seven cuttings, six were flowering or in bud. I have put them on a sunny, cold windowsill. (The windowsill is cold because it is in a room I hardly ever heat, and it’s now cold enough to need heating in the mornings and evenings). Let’s see what happens. My hypothesis is that taking pelargonium cuttings is so easy that even if you do it very badly, they will succeed. If I am wrong, and I don’t realise they are dead until the frost kills the pelargoniums outside, it doesn’t matter because I have a plant growing indoors and can take some cuttings off that in the proper manner. I will, of course, report the outcome honestly in this blog.

Very badly taken pelargonium cuttings

On Monday I was just outside chatting to a neighbour when I managed to flag down a passing tree surgeon and got him to quote for shortening the Leylandii trunks and trimming the hedges. He also said how about trimming the silver birch, and I said wouldn’t the pond be in the way, and he said no, so I said do the silver birch as well.

(It is, of course, sometimes a bad idea to have work done on the house or garden by someone who just happens to be passing. However, I have had this tree surgeon’s leaflet through my door a few times over several years. Anyone who has been in business as a tree surgeon for several years is probably competent, for obvious reasons).

So on Friday, as the FTSE-100 soared to its biggest one-day percentage rise since it was invented, and short-selling was banned on financial shares, I handed over the entire contents of my hedge fund to the tree surgeon, and the sun shone brightly all day. I think he did a good job, although I don’t think he trimmed the hedges as neatly as my usual tree surgeon. However, it was a good price, the hedges look miles better than they did before, and most importantly, he happened to be there when I needed the job done. He trimmed my Leylandii trunks to about 3 ft high. I would have preferred them to be a little longer (I asked him to do 4-5 ft) so I could have more leverage, but I think I will be able to manage fine.

Leylandii trunks cut down to about 3 feet

I may be taking a short position on my beautiful Lawsonian Cypress ‘Pelts Blue’ in the corner next spring, but that’s only to make it more bushy, not because I can’t afford a stake for it and want to get the government to prop it up for me. OK, enough of the hedging jokes.

This morning the sun was still shining for some reason, and I started digging the Leylandii up. I started in the corner, because this one is the biggest tree and the hardest to get at, so I thought I would do it first and then the others will seem much easier. My technique for digging up trees is to dig a big hole around them and trim away any small roots, just leaving the big ones. Then I can cut through the big roots and push the tree over.

Leylandii with roots exposed

Just getting to the stage shown in the photograph was a lot of work. I think it may have taken as much as an hour and a half. At this point I realised that the whole task was going to cost thousands of calories, so I went in for a cup of tea and baked myself a cake.

This morning I chopped off all the branches of the four Leylandii trees that I am replacing, apart from the ones right at the very top which I couldn’t reach.

The four Leylandii trees after I had removed almost all their branches

It was quite an easy job removing them. Most of them were thin enough to come off with my telescopic loppers, and I sawed through the rest using a hand saw. I didn’t use my Alligator Loppers because I want to practise a bit more before disobeying the instructions not to use them while standing on a ladder. The thing to do is to look up while you are cutting off the branch several feet above your head, and then look down, so the branch falls on the back of your head and neck rather than on your face. In fact, because the hedge is so thick and tangled, falling branches did not gather a lot of speed and therefore it wasn’t painful having them land on me. As Leylandii branches bring me out in a rash on contact it was a good thing not to have them touching my face.

When renewing a hedge on a boundary, it is a good idea to notify your neighbours first. If they like the hedge, they will be disappointed when they see it go, and if they don’t like it, they will be disappointed when the new one starts growing. Although it is a supposedly well-known fact that everyone hates Leylandii, my neighbours like the hedge for the same reason that I do – it gives them privacy. So I have warned them about what I am doing and therefore I hope they did not get too much of a shock seeing bits of my garden for the first time (the hedge was there when they moved in). I think I did quite well to drop only one branch into their garden – I retrieved it with a rake, so that my shredder will not be deprived.

I now need to decide whether I am going to remove the poles myself or get a tree surgeon to do the job. Although they look quite thin in the photograph, they are at least the size of an upper arm, and it can be quite hard work sawing through something of this size when it is vertical. It will also be a fair amount of work digging the stumps out, but I think I can manage this as long as I take my time about it. While I think about this, the next job is to shred all the remains. Stripping the trees took me about one and a half hours. I expect the shredding to take at least that.

The magnolia’s leaves are going brown. I hope this is because it thinks it is autumn, and not because it thinks it’s fed up with being in a pot. I did give it some plant food granules last week.

Today I decided to tackle the bigger of the two conifers and dig it up completely. I dug a large circular hole around the conifer and used long-handled loppers to cut off its roots as I went along. It was quite hard work because of the quantity of soil I had to shift, but it wasn’t very daunting. Now I just have the other conifer to dig up, which I will do another day. I want to keep the tree stumps but saw them up into logs and leave them somewhere as a refuge for wildlife.