Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Wisdom has it that we are having the longest cold snap in Britain (1) for 15 years (2) since 1963 and (3) since 1947. I don’t remember 1995 being particularly snowy, but maybe it was Scotland that was cold, and dragged down the average for the rest of us. Or maybe it was exceptionally cold in March, but not in January. I am pleased to say that I don’t remember 1963 or 1947 at all.

The big event was Tuesday night (5th January 2010). The Met Office forecast was bang on – it started snowing heavily at six o’clock. The next morning I stuck my ruler into the snow on my drive, and the depth was 21.5 cm. We didn’t get much more snow after that, but because it has been so cold, the snow has taken a long time to disappear.

On the morning following the snowfall, I brushed the snow off the greenhouse roof – that’s the second time I’ve had to do that – and also went and beat up all my conifers to get most of the snow off their branches. It was good to see my little baby thuja stand up again once they were free from the weight.

I’m worried that I am going to lose some of my plants. Although they are all very hardy, plants in pots can die because all the soil freezes solid. But there is nothing I can do about this now. And at least none of the plants is a rare variety – they are all easily replaceable. The only one I had trouble obtaining is the Waldsteinia, and I have given bits of that to two other people, and have planted some in a sheltered spot, so I am confident that I can get some back if I need to.

The rose that did a flower bud (still just about visible on the right) must have had a big shock to find one of its stems completely encased in ice:

And I do think the Pieris looks beautiful with its temporary appendages.

I have finished the staining of the wooden shelving in the greenhouse and have screwed the shelves back in place. It was very difficult to get them back in. I had taken the precaution of photographing the shelves in their original positions so I knew which shelf went where (by comparing the positions of the knots in the wood), but it still required considerable brute force to push them into place. I tried to put the screws back into their original holes but this was difficult too. This is what the end result looks like, and I think it was probably worth it.

It is definitely autumn now, and that means loads of mushrooms. The following specimen is growing in abundance in one of our communal landscaped areas.

I am hoping that it is not honey fungus. I looked up honey fungus on the Internet and it is supposed to be apparent under the bark of the tree, which it isn’t. So maybe it is just some pretty brown stuff.

My tomatoes are still going happily and not suffering from blight, thanks to my copper fungicide. I am also pleased to report that my blackberry, which flowered wrongly last month, is now wrongly sporting a cluster of green fruits.

Now that I have finished staining the staging, I can do some fun stuff, like demolishing the raspberry frame. This edifice was put up in June 1996 by a working party led by my dad. Since he had to mix the concrete by hand, we were economical with it, and dug nice neat holes with plenty of rubble in them. As a result, I found that after digging to a depth of about six inches around one of the posts, I could easily push it over. Indeed, a six-foot man could probably push the posts over without needing to dig any of the soil out first. However, this is not a disparaging comment on its construction (my parents never read this blog, but someone else might read it and tell them), since the frame has stood firm in many bouts of strong winds for more than thirteen years. I am just glad that this is going to be an easy job.

It is now coming up to the end of June, and this is when I enter the annual competition against the willowherb. The game is to pull it all up before it sets seed. The willowherb has its name inscribed on the trophy for every one of the past thirteen years. What makes me think this year will be any different? Two things: I’m not going away on holiday this summer, and this week, I’ve got a week off work!

The forecast is for a heatwave, gradually turning cooler by the end of the week. There could be thunderstorms and heavy showers, but generally the South should be fairly dry. So I am hoping that I will be able to manage two hours a day from today until Friday. If so, this is what I am going to do:

(1) Pull up every single willowherb plant.
(2) Pull up any other weeds that get in the way.
(3) Collect up all the random pots in my garden and arrange them in stacks according to size.
(4) Repot all parts of the Portable Herbaceous Border that need repotting, and pull out the weeds in the pots.
(5) Trim the marjoram (this is on the left hand side of the garden so you can’t see it in either of the photos in this post).
(6) Prune the apple trees. (OK, this is getting into the realms of fantasy now, so maybe I’d better stop here. It is, after all, a week I’ve got off work, not a year).

And anyway, the right hand side of the garden doesn’t look too bad:

It’s a bit green, but that’s hardly a bad thing in a garden.

I can report that the greenhouse is now wired up to the mains. An electrician who is a friend of one of my engineering students did it a week ago. If anyone else has a Fawt Nova Octagonal Greenhouse and is wondering how to wire it up, have a look at my photograph.

You can see that the armoured cable comes in through the floor (it would be better if it had been put nearer the wall when the base was laid but never mind) and goes into a control box. The control box has one circuit for lighting and one for the plug points. It also has a RCD. I have a RCD set to the same sensitivity in the main consumer unit, so if there was a fault, either of them could trip. One of the three cables coming out of the control box goes up to the power point directly above it. The power point is an outdoor use one because I could easily get water on it when working there and I don’t want to keep tripping the RCD (or even worse, finding out that the RCD on this particular occasion doesn’t work!) The power point rests on a small piece of wood so that the cover can close. The cable coming out of the left of the control box goes to a second double power socket. Having four power points is useful because I may want to plug in a few propagators as well as a heater. The cable to the right goes to the light switch. The light switch is just above the door frame. It was quite hard to find a place big enough to attach it so, but I can easily reach the switch here and I think it works well.

The lightbulb is attached to a holder in the centre of the roof.

Here is a picture of the whole thing (apart from the roof).

It was not an easy job to do the wiring. My electrician took about six hours, including wiring the other end of the cable to the consumer unit in the garage. He has put an isolator switch in the garage so when I’m on holiday I can switch the electricity off, in case a burglar comes into my garden and plugs lots of really powerful appliances into the greenhouse sockets, thus running up a huge electricity bill. I thought it was worth writing about this job in some detail because I think other people might want to know how to wire up a greenhouse like this one and have it still looking nice afterwards.

I have spent two sessions since the last post breaking up the path in front of the pond, removing the underlay for the pond liner and breaking up the edge of the pond. I managed to remove all the paving slabs quite easily, but most of the foundation of the pond was solid concrete, which I broke up with a pickaxe. This was quite easy, really. It is absolutely essential to wear eye protection for this job. It is also highly advisable to keep your mouth shut, however much the exertion may make you want to breathe through your mouth. I used the pickaxe to make a line of indentations at right angles to the path edge and eventually a section would break off. It is important to work out how much you can lift, and break the concrete up into sections that are not too heavy.

I pulled away the remaining underlay and put it on top of various earth piles, where it will provide the useful function of deterring cats who want to increase the organic content of my soil. I also dug a little deeper right at the bottom of the hole so I could bury a very heavy kerbstone that I dug up from the shrub patch next to my house when the Residents planted things last April. The kerbstone was too heavy for me to lift safely so I didn’t want to try and take it to the dump.

I have started to remove one of the tree stumps that was left in place when the pond was dug. It has flaked off into small pieces, which I am putting in my compost heap. I think there are more tree stumps in the area. There is also a great deal of rubble, and the soil directly under the path is poor quality subsoil, not topsoil as I had hoped. I think I am going to end up with too much subsoil and not enough topsoil. As I have no intention of paying to have the subsoil taken away and replaced with topsoil, I am going to have to convert the subsoil to topsoil. I am not sure whether this is actually possible, but I found an article here that said it was: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/shade_gardening/714. I think I just have to remove the rubble and any large stones and add some compost or soil improver. I am not going to add any sand because my subsoil is sandy enough.

I am seriously considering whether to keep my temporary pond. Over the past few days I have enjoyed the activity that I can see from my kitchen window while doing the washing up. A thrush has been pulling out bits of plant, presumably to make a nest with. Maybe I will put in a small moulded pond where the temporary pond is now, when the real pond has been dug.

I rang up the greenhouse installer and told him the window wouldn’t fasten shut, and he said I should give it a shake and then try again. So I gave it a shake, and it was a little nearer to being fastenable, and then another shake, and then a few more, and then I could fasten it. I’m not convinced the fasteners are really in the right place, but there don’t seem to be any gaps when the window is closed, which is the important thing.

It is possible that the newts that I transferred from the old pond to my plastic buckets may have died because the water got too cold overnight. There was a smaller volume of water in the buckets than in the pond, so it would have got colder more quickly. Although the newts could get out, they may not have realised in time that they were getting too cold. It was a shame that they died, but I have found plenty more around the old pond, so the population is not in danger.

Today the men came to erect the greenhouse.

They did it very quickly and I think it looks as beautiful as I had hoped. They gave me some top tips for being nice to greenhouses: (1) if you leave the door open, make sure you fasten it open with the metal stay because if it bangs it will break the glass and distort the frame; (2) if it snows, get the snow off the roof.

I would add a third Top Tip for greenhouse installation: the installers may leave the door and window open to allow the smell of mastic to dissipate. Before the installers leave, try closing the door and window. I did not do this, and I have found that the window will close, but the stay is misaligned, which means that only one of the prongs fits into a hole. I’m not sure this matters because the window is quite tightly closed, but I should have checked. The door closes, but only just. I will try applying some Free and Easy from Lakeland, which has worked wonders on my sliding bookcase doors.

Anyway, it is done now, and I just need some electricity and then I can start playing with the greenhouse.

I gave my plants their first dose of Wilkinson’s plant food. I also gave all the acid-loving plants some granules. Then I took up some more of the path by the original pond and put it around the temporary pond to make a sort-of decorative border. I also pulled out some of the underlining and put it next to the temporary pond. I am going to use these areas to deposit rubble when I destroy the paths and the original pond.

I found some more sleeping newts under the under-lining.

I peeled away enough of the under-lining to see what had caused the pond to sink. I found that great gaping holes had appeared above the disused soakaway. I will have to excavate properly and fill them in, so it is a good thing that I have too much subsoil. Also I am a bit worried about the foundations of the path that runs in front of the pond. I think they might be a bit solid, which means I may have trouble removing them. However, I do have a pickaxe. And the tree stump, which Lotus Landscapes left under the path twelve years ago because it was too heavy to remove, is not going to give me a lot of trouble. I bashed it lightly with a spade and it started flaking away. Unfortunately I haven’t left it there long enough for it to turn into coal, but I can put the rotted remains into my compost heap.

The snow has stopped, the sun has occasionally come out, and progress has been happening. The base for the greenhouse was laid on Thursday 19th February. Here it is:

The greenhouse is a lot smaller than the base. I have measured it to have a border of 60 cm width all round it. The back right hand corner has not been cut off like the other ones because this is where I need access to the compost bins and therefore I will need to walk on that area. You can just about see the black armoured cable sticking out of it. This should come up just inside the greenhouse and then it can be wired up to a junction box and the other cabling can come out of there.

As you can see, the base looks very pretty and even more importantly, flat. However, I am not really sure about whether I did the right thing here. The problem is that the garden is not perfectly rectangular. The landscapers asked me whether I wanted it square to the back fence or the side fence, and we all agreed that it would be best to have it square to the side fence, since the back fence will eventually be hidden by the conifers. However, what I should have asked for was to have it square to the house. The leading edge is not quite parallel to the house, which means that it may be difficult to join up the base with the patio near the house without making it look wonky, and also that it may look crooked when I look out of the kitchen window at it while doing the washing up.

When the garden was designed, I decided that I wanted straight edges rather than curves. The advantages of straight edges are that they take better advantage of the space available and they are often easier to implement because there is less cutting of stone to do. However, the disadvantages are that everything has to be measured more precisely for it to work. And using sandstone rather than crazy paving accentuates the parallel (or supposedly parallel) lines even more.

Looking back on this project, there are a lot of things I would have done differently had I known what I do now. For a start, I would have laid the electric cable myself. There was no reason on earth why I shouldn’t have done that, and I would have been spared worrying about whether the fence would fall down. (Indeed, I think I might have dug a trench parallel to the fence but six or more feet away and very deep instead of alongside the fence). Also, I would have removed the existing crazy paving path where it met the edges of the patio base. Then I wouldn’t have the foundations of the existing path running into the foundations of the new base, and it would have been easier to remove them without interfering with the new foundations. And finally I may have even had the path to the greenhouse installed at the same time as doing the base so that I could be sure that everything would line up nicely.

However, it is done now, and I now have to move onto the next phase of the project. I have been drawing up a plan of all the things I have to do and I will post it here when I have finished thinking of things to put in it. For the time being, I am busy filling in the trench with topsoil. I have some subsoil left over because the landscapers put sand in the trench with the cable (good idea) and therefore there is not enough space to put all the subsoil back. So I am moving the subsoil out of the way, and eventually I will use it to fill in the existing pond. I am also not happy about the depth of the cable for the last bit of its journey to the fusebox – the landscapers did that bit – and so I shall dig that at least six inches deeper.

Meanwhile I am waiting for the greenhouse installer to phone me to confirm a date, and then I will get my electrician to wire up the cable for me. And then I can go and play in my greenhouse.

After all the snow, the Met Office offered us some more snow, but we turned it down and had rain instead. A huge amount of rain. I had expected it to wash away all the snow, but it didn’t. There is still some left around the place, but not in my back garden. Thanks to the rain, I now have an interesting water feature:

We had some strong winds on Monday night and Tuesday morning. They were forecast well in advance and I shoved some extra buckets of soil and bits of rubble next to the posts. Fortunately the winds were easterly, or northeasterly and the fence stayed up. With luck, the fence only now has to manage to stay upright until 22 February, when the base is due to be laid and the trench can be filled in again. However, I don’t know how far behind the landscapers are with their other jobs after the snow.

The weather is just being plain unreasonable. As soon as it gets warm enough for me to get a spade into the ground, it starts pouring down. Nevertheless, things have been happening. For a start, my greenhouse was delivered on Wednesday 14 January. I was at work, but I left the garage unlocked. This is how much space it takes up:

The base is not getting laid until towards the end of February, but that doesn’t matter because it will give me plenty of time to dig my trench for the cable. I will it as deep as I can be bothered, which is unlikely to be more than 18 inches. The only thing I am worried about is whether, if I dig the soil away from one side of the concrete fence posts, the fence will blow down. I am hoping that the sheer weight of the concrete will hold it fast. Also, unlike the fence on the other side of the garden, it has never shown any signs of wanting to fall down in the past thirteen years, so perhaps it will be all right.

So far I have managed to dig the entire trench to a spade’s depth, and moved all the topsoil over to the area by the pond, which gets it out of the way. I am now excavating deeper, and heaping the subsoil by the trench, so that when I fill it in, I can put the subsoil back in it first. We had two dry days – Tuesday and Wednesday – when I was at work during daylight hours, and then it poured with rain last night and this morning. In the afternoon the sun came out, but of course the ground was still very soggy. I checked the Met Office website, and there is a severe weather warning out for heavy rain this evening, so I decided I had better put in a stint of digging. I put in an hour just before it started to get dark, at about half past four. Because I have sandy soil, it is not waterlogged, but the soil is heavier when wet, so I can’t do as much without getting tired. But at least I did something. We have unsettled weather forecast for the next few days, but perhaps I will be able to continue on Monday.

One of my neighbours came and looked at my damaged fence (see last entry) and thought that it was done by an intruder climbing over the fence. Sadly, I think she is right. Although I had thought the damage must have been done from the other side of the fence because the splinters are on my side, the splinters could also have landed there if someone’s foot pressed down on the wood while heaving themselves onto the shed roof. I’m glad I have chosen toughened glass for my greenhouse if people are going to come into my garden at night and climb on things.

We have had the most amazing spell of cold weather. I can’t remember when it last was this cold for so long. The Met Office has been giving us severe weather warnings and the government will make extra payments to pensioners because the weather is so cold. Until 22nd December, the Met Office stuck to its story that it will be a warmer than average winter, but now it’ll have to be about twenty degrees all through February if that’s going to happen, so they’re claiming we’re going to have below average temperatures in January and near average in February.

I haven’t even been tidying up the garden because it has been too cold, but fortunately I got a lot of tidying up done in November. Here is a picture taken from an upstairs window. It shows nearly the entire width of the garden – there’s just a bit missing on the left. The white blobs are sleet – something that we have had quite a lot of recently.

Progress has been happening – my greenhouse is to be delivered next week. I have got a quote from my usual landscaping company for laying a base for the greenhouse. I am going to deviate from the plan and extend the solid paving around the back and sides instead of having stepping stones, because I think it will be more practical and easy to maintain. It will also be more expensive, but I think it will be worth it. My landscaping contractors will lay the cable from the greenhouse to the house, and then I just have to get an electrician to wire it up to a spur in the kitchen. The landscaper recommends burying the cable to a depth of one foot, so that’s not as much digging as I had thought. However, I intend to dig the trench deeper than that if I can be bothered and if weather permits.

Today I went out into the garden for the first time since before Christmas, apart from to empty the compost bowl. I swept the garage in preparation for the arrival of the greenhouse, and as an experiment, tried to dig a bit more of the trench. I found that once I had cracked the frozen inch or so at the surface, it was quite easy to dig out the soil, so that’s quite good news. I also think I am acclimatising to the extreme cold. Although my fingers went slightly numb, it wasn’t too bad – and I know it was still cold because there was ice and frost on the ground, and my pond was frozen over (although I found that the ice wasn’t thick enough for me to skate on).

My fence has been damaged.

It looks as if the damage was done by something from next door’s garden. It’s a bit puzzling, because I would have thought an animal would have attacked the fence a bit lower down. Next door’s shed (you can see the roof of it behind the fence) is only about six inches from my fence, so it must be a long, thin animal. Maybe the fence was head-butted by a grass snake. The panel is replaceable, but for now I will repair it with some bits of wood over the gap.