Helen's Garden Renovation Project

For the past week we have had wall-to-wall sunshine and it’s been unusually warm. I have had to water my pots and my newly planted shrubs and trees. Everything is growing very fast and is very green. Except for the camellia, but it’s looking less yellow than it did a few months ago. And the evergreen Euonymus, which is meant to look yellow.

Overview of my garden, which is sadly lacking in May colour.

However, I can’t help but notice that there’s not much of interest to look at in May. The apple blossom is over, and the hibiscus is several months away from flowering. I will be planting the pelargoniums soon, but I need some May colour. To be fair, the rhododendron that I planted last month, in the far left corner, will probably be flowering at this time when it’s a bit older. It has buds, but I think it’s going to flower later than normal because it’s still very young.

I have been thinking of getting a ceanothus, and this gives me some justification. I would also like a lilac, but I don’t think I have room, and I need some more evergreens so it doesn’t look so bare in winter. Maybe I can put a lilac in the front garden.

As my own garden is so dull, here are some plants that I photographed at Wisley on Friday.

Iris Tirra Lirra

Paeonia Suffruticosa

Progress is happening with the ponds. The plants that I bought only ten days ago have grown incredibly quickly. You can see the Ranunculus aquatlilis doing white flowers in the raised pond. I potted the Ranunculus into bigger baskets last Thursday because its roots were coming out of the baskets they were in – only a week after I bought them! I have bought some more aquatic compost and some small pebbles to put on top of the planting baskets, and I am planning to pot the rest into bigger baskets tomorrow.

I have painted 12 concrete bricks that I bought from B&Q with black Blagdon pond paint. The paint has produced a nice effect and I have to wait another six days before I can put them in the pond. However, I may wait longer, and give them a coat of V8 Pondseal because I don’t think the Blagdon pond paint gives a very tough finish and the paint may rub off too easily.

If the hot weather continues, I will have emptied the shallow pond completely by the end of the week, using the water for my apple trees and shrubs, and then I will be able to make another attempt at repairing the pond and making the join between the pond liner and the render watertight.

We have had hardly any rain this week. That is, it has still rained on most days, but not as much as we have become used to. The temperature has been rising to double figures some of the time, and it’s time to think seriously about this year’s Pot Reduction Target. The Pot Reduction season lasts until the onset of the Willowherb Elimination Stakes.

So I took a pot census this afternoon and I found that I had 71 altogether. This includes a few bulbs. I didn’t count the bulbs last year because I was keeping them down the side passage, and forgot about them. This was very bad for the bulbs as they did not get enough light and probably not enough water either, and so this year they did not flower. I decided that it was too labour-intensive to try to keep bulbs going when they are so cheap to buy. So I threw out most of them, and I will buy some more when I am ready to plant them somewhere.

I then planted some Persicaria in a bare patch in the Residents’ planting area, leaving me with 70 pots. I think a good target would be 50.

I was pleased to see that my little oxygenators placed in the new ponds on Thursday have not drowned and are pushing up their leaves and flowers to reach the surface. Good oxygenators. Well done. I think they have started growing already. Nothing stands still at this time of year.

I made an attempt to remove some of the very invasive pondweed from the temporary pond, but I am afraid to remove too much in case I remove some newt eggs or tadpoles. I am thinking that my best bet would be not to try to salvage any of the vegetation to put in the new ponds, but to buy fresh supplies of the Pontederia cordata, iris and waterlily that are currently growing vigorously in it, if I want to have them in my new pond. In autumn, when the newt tadpoles have grown up and the new ponds are full of feathery oxygenators, I can just compost everything in the temporary pond and start again.

Today it didn’t rain, and I went to Squires Garden Centre at Badshot Lea to buy some plants for my ponds. In the temporary pond, I already have some Pontederia Cordata, Iris Laevigata ‘Midnight’ and a water lily ‘Rose Magnolia’. Unfortunately I also have some New Zealand Pygmyweed, which is not approved of by the RHS as it is very vigorous and invasive. I decided I would try to use gentler oxygenators in the raised pond, so I bought some Water starwort (Callitriche) and some Water crowfoot (Ranunculus aquatilis)

I also bought some plants that weren’t on the list. I bought an Iris ensata because it looked as if it would be pretty, and some handsome Equisetum Japonicum. When I got home I looked up the Equisetum in my book and found that it could be invasive. But it’s probably all right when kept in a pot.

Pond plants: Iris ensata and Barred horsetail

When I got home the first thing I did was to print new labels for the plants so I could take off the existing labels and read the instructions. Then I attempted to “plant” them. You might think that planting marginals and oxygenators is a doddle – just dump them in the pond. It wasn’t that easy. The raised pond has a shelf all around it for marginal planting, but it is designed to hold the plants when they are much bigger and are sitting in very big baskets. The plants I bought today were in quite small baskets, and some of them didn’t want to be very far under the surface of the water. Even those that wanted to be drowned a bit were vulnerable because if they fell off the shelf they probably really would drown.

So I ended up putting some of the plants in the corner of the raised pond, jammed in by edging blocks, and some of the plants in the corner of the shallow pond, again jammed in by edging blocks. This is not ideal because the concrete blocks are not sealed and may leak concrete chemicals into the pond. I think that what I will have to do is to repot the plants into big baskets with heavy stones on the bottom and filled with heavy aquatic compost. I think it would also be useful to get some heavy blocks from B&Q and paint them with pond paint to hold the plants in place.

We had another fall of snow last night. Again, it wasn’t much – only about 5 cm. Already the snow is melting rapidly in the sunshine.

There is a great contrast between my two ponds in terms of temperature. The raised pond is covered with the full dose of snow and underneath there is thick ice. The shallow pond has no snow on it, and is covered only with a very thin, weak layer of ice through which I can easily push a finger.

Raised pond covered in snow; shallow pond covered in thin ice

I had expected the raised pond to be more prone to getting frozen than the shallow pond, but even so the contrast surprises me. I wonder if the wall of the raised pond is giving some shelter to the shallow pond, thus preventing it from getting too cold. If so, it is good news for the wildlife. If I want to keep fish in the raised pond, I will need to be careful about remembering to break the ice for them. I am hoping that in time the pieris (see snow-covered plant behind the far corner of the raised pond) will grow big enough to give some shelter to one corner, thus impeding the ice formation in that corner.

According to my friend John, this is all my fault for saying in my last entry that we hadn’t had any snow yet.

The first snowfall for the new ponds

Despite the fact that I am re-reading my complete Perry Mason collection during the snug winter evenings, I cannot think of a defence.

The snow fell on Saturday evening, and therefore some of it has now sublimed off into the atmosphere. I think the depth was 5 cm at most, so this is a minor event in comparison with what we have had in the last two winters. However, even before the snow, the temperature has been too low to do any gardening, sinking to -7.3C on Saturday morning. I suppose I could have picked up some more fallen leaves for about ten minutes before my fingers froze solid, or I could have pruned the bay tree, but I decided not to. My wrist is now nearly recovered, but I may still not be able to lift any pots if they are stuck to the ground with ice.

With the Met Office forecasting a month of cold weather and probably some more snow, this month is going to be a month of armchair gardening, as I draw up my shortlist of shrubs and work out where to buy them from. There is a chance that I may be able to partly solve the problem of wanting more shrubs than will fit into the space by putting some of them in pots. I would have to make sure that I only chose very hardy shrubs, because shrubs in pots are much more vulnerable to cold than shrubs in the open ground, but I will have plenty of patio space once I have planted everything that is meant to go into the permanent planting.

The other gardening-related thing I have in mind is to spend a month tweeting about gardening on Twitter and see if I can get the RHS to follow me. The RHS follows all sorts of people, so I think I could be in with a chance.

We are now having proper autumn, with lots of leaves and lots of rain. The shallow pond has filled up as far as it is going to, and my gamble over the mortar join did not pay off. This gamble was to paint over the mortar around the edge of the pond with Pondseal and hope that the join between the mortar and the liner was watertight. Well, it isn’t. This means that in spring, or whenever we get the next prolonged dry spell, I will have to drain the pond, chisel a neat edge to the mortar, clear out any gunk in the gap, and fill the gap with purpose-made sealant. I am not all that bothered about doing this because (a) I thought I probably would have to anyway and (b) I also want to put some cobbles around the sloping side and I will have to drain the pond before mortaring or glueing them in place.

I was slightly more disappointed to find that the repair of my second water butt has not worked. It is dripping steadily from the base of the strip that I stuck over the hole. However, the repair of the first water butt is still holding, and the repair of the second is still an improvement, as the second water butt joined to it has been able to fill to the brim, which never happened before because the water drained out of the first water butt too fast. I decided to stop the leak temporarily by emptying out all my water butts into the raised pond, which seems to be holding water nicely. The water is now about two inches above the marginal shelf. I estimate that this is about one-third full. By spring it should be completely full, no problem.

And the final disappointment is that my lovely Canon G9 camera has got an E18 lens error, which means that the lens won’t retract fully when the power is turned off. You would have thought that this would just mean it won’t fit in its case any more, not that it won’t take any more photographs, but unfortunately it won’t work any more. I have tried all the suggestions on the Internet except taking the camera to bits. In my experience, nothing good ever comes of taking things to bits.

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.

Overview at the end of the growing season for 2011, left hand side

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.

Overview at the end of the growing season for 2011, right hand side

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.

The exceptionally fine and dry weather has been continuing, and I suddenly decided it was time to stop looking despairingly at my raised pond and do something about it. I removed the tarpaulin and all its supports, and bailed out the few inches of water at the bottom. Then I got a stiff brush and some water, and scrubbed away at the failed pond paint and the algae, and I sanded the bits I couldn’t reach with the brush, and I kept going until I decided that all the paint that wanted to come off probably had come off. Then I gave the inside of the pond a wash with a damp cloth (the washing water came away dark grey, so the colour was still coming off) and let it dry.

I had to decide what to do about the cracked render at the bottom of the pond. The pond builder seemed to think that removing all the render at the bottom was a bad idea, but I don’t know why. Perhaps he thought I might puncture the liner with my chisel. I decided to pick off all the bits that had come loose, and paint over the hairline cracks.

The pond before repainting, showing the cracks in the bottom

I wanted to use V8 Pondseal with a black additive to make the inside of the pond uniformly black, but I couldn’t find anywhere, even on the Internet, that was selling the black additive, so I think it’s been discontinued. There are black paints available that are probably suitable for recoating concrete that has already been painted, or partly painted, but I decided that I wanted to get the pond up and running now instead of waiting until I could get hold of some black paint. I knew that the pond would have dried out quite well in the warm and dry weather, and now was a good time to block any more moisture from getting into the concrete blocks that have been used to build up the shelf inside the pond. Later on, when I have done the rest of the garden, I can empty and clean the pond and then apply more paint. There is bound to be something that will go on top of Pondseal (as long as I sand it down well).

So today I gave the pond three coats of paint. The strange thing about the Pondseal is that the manufacturer’s opinion of how much paint I need wildly differs from my experience. I estimated that the area I painted last week to seal in the render in the shallow pond was probably close to a square metre, and I did three coats. As 1 litre is supposed to cover 3 -5 square metres, this area ought to require somewhere between 0.6 and 1 litre. In fact I didn’t even use half the 500ml can that I had. The surface area of the raised pond is just over 6 square metres. That should have required at least 3.6 litres, and perhaps as much as 6 litres. I bought 1.5 litres, relying on my previous experience rather than what was written on the can, and used 1 full litre plus some more of the 500ml can left over from painting the shallow pond. I therefore have an unused can, which I can either return to the garden centre or keep for further work on the shallow pond in spring, once I find out where it needs attention. Or maybe I can use it to coat concrete blocks which I will put in the pond to stand plants on.

So maybe I should feel a little uneasy about the huge discrepancy between the amount of paint I have used and the amount that I “should” have used. Perhaps my render was not porous enough. But on the plus side, the black colour didn’t come off into the paint when I painted over it, so I am daring to hope that I may have sealed in the pigment. And the pond looks black and shiny, so it seems that some of the first lot of paint must have been absorbed before it got washed off.

The pond, painted with two coats of V8 Pondseal and surrounded by dustsheets.

I have done a little earth moving this month, but the next stage is on hold until the apple trees go to sleep and I can dig them up. Meanwhile, the weather has been much kinder than it was in the summer. I mended my second water butt and so far it is holding water. But even more importantly, this is an opportunity to tackle the ponds.

The shallow pond after the first coat of waterproofing

You can see that the construction of the shallow pond mainly uses pond liner, with some render applied to the side of the block edging. The pond will not fill beyond the join between render and pond liner. So today I have applied some waterproofing compound to the render. I do not know whether this will allow the pond to fill completely, because it could be leaking from the join between the render and the pond liner. But I am pretty sure that the render needs waterproofing. For one thing, every time it rains, a small amount of it washes off into the pond, making a yellow-brown sludge. So I have decided to waterproof the render and see what happens. I have a suspicion that this pond will require frequent maintenance. Some of the render is very thin and is bound to crack and fall off this winter. I can see myself having to drain the pond every spring and patch up the render and apply more waterproofing. Still, applying waterproofing is not too bad a job. The paint goes on easily, and the brush has to be cleaned with cellulose thinners, which smell heavenly.

And next, if the weather continues to be dry, I will lift up the tarpaulin and take a look at the raised pond.

The wisteria is once again becoming wisterical.

The wisteria going wisterical, as usual

So I pruned it.

Wisteria less wisterical than before

I know what the books say about pruning wisteria – you have to do it twice a year, in July/August and January, and you have to cut x amount off each soft traily bit leaving y leaves still on there, and then it flowers. These instructions are clearly written by people without burglar alarm boxes and drainpipes. The only pruning instruction that my wisteria understands is, “Cut off as much as you can without falling off the ladder”. I am still waiting for the part of the process where it flowers.

A kind friend said that in the recent Willowherb Elimination Stakes he was rooting for the willowherb, describing it as “attractive and the way the seeds unpeel is nice (and it is, of course, free and very low maintenance)”. Low maintenance is a good way of describing a plant that needs no encouragement. Maybe next year the willowherb and I will have come to an arrangement where we can live together in harmony.

Another kind friend warned me that I had a demon in the Temporary Pond. I had noticed it had been getting somewhat overgrown, but I am used to having to pull out great handfuls of the pondweed from time to time.

Overgrown pond with pontederia cordata (nice plant) in flower

She identified my demon as Crassula helmskii, aka New Zealand Pygmyweed. The RHS and other highly respected organisations have terrible things to say about it, mainly because it is an invasive non-native species. I have no idea whether this is the pondweed I originally bought in 1996 or whether it hitched a lift into my pond and took over from what I intended to have. However, in a small pond it requires little maintenance – just five minutes a month in the peak growing season to rip out a few handfuls and compost them after leaving them by the side of the pond for a few days for things to crawl out. And it IS a good oxygenator, and the pond has always been very healthy with the weed in it.

Crassula helmsii or New Zealand Pygmyweed

So I am not going to attempt to eradicate the demon, but I may consider using a different type of pondweed if I ever get the two official ponds up and running.

I have been engaged in the pleasurable but demanding task of eating all the Discovery apples before they go off – they do not store well. I don’t know what they are like when cooked, but it seems a waste to cook them when they taste so divine raw. After I’ve finished with them, I have Charles Ross to contend with. It is a shame that both my apple trees have chosen odd years to bear their maximum fruit load, but perhaps when I move them, one of them will be upset enough to start producing in even years.

And finally… I notice that WordPress is now inserting pictures where I want them, instead of automatically putting them at the beginning of the article and expecting me to cut and paste them. I do not know whether this is because I have a new version of WordPress or because I sacked Internet Explorer 9 (it’s unbelievably slow and crashes even more often than Internet Explorer 8, which is saying something) and installed Google Chrome.