Helen's Garden Renovation Project

I can’t complain about the recent weather, but the autumn term is fast approaching. This means I have to prepare for the new season of tutoring. This does not just involve looking at some textbooks and exam papers; it means filling up the freezer with meals in square pots because when I am tutoring there is no time to cook. So I have been busy, and the garden has been lucky to have had its lawn mowed.

This morning I still didn’t do any gardening, but I did a quick survey of my plants to see which ones knew what they were doing. Here are the results:

Kerria (clueless plant. Supposed to flower in April).

Hibiscus Blue Bird (supposed to flower in summer. Correct. Well done, plant).

Primula or Polyanthus. Supposed to flower in spring. Totally confused.

Rose. Supposed to flower in June, but August is near enough. (Note added 06 September 2009: this rose is called 'Mischief' and is an offspring of 'Fragrant Cloud').

I also had an attempted flowering incident from a rhododendron (two blooms), and my Viola Magnifico from Morrison’s has been flowering ever since it seeded itself into two of my pots of thuja.

It’s probably wrong of me to criticise my plants when I had a totally indulgent afternoon of wandering around other people’s gardens instead of putting mine to rights. I went to Windmill House, which was hosting an open afternoon in aid of the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice. The main strengths of the garden were the mature trees and shrubs. There were lots of lavenders and heathers, which I took careful note of because I want to use heathers and other plants in the area between my greenhouse and the thuja. However, on the minus side, they had wasted an awful lot of space by putting a tennis court in the garden. One of my neighbours was out watering her garden as I walked by on my return from Windmill House, and she invited me in to see her back garden, which I have never seen before. None of her garden is wasted. It’s all plants, and exciting ones too, like figs and orange trees and all sorts of exotic plants which I have never seen before. They go into the conservatory for winter. There are criss-crossing paths to take you between the plants (one has to breathe in) and no lawn and definitely no tennis courts. I think it was a good thing for me to spend time seeing these gardens instead of weeding because it’s very important to have lots of Motivation and Inspiration when working on a Garden Renovation Project.

The nonsense spam comments (see last post) are still coming in. It was almost a relief for me to get some spam from a German pornography site because at least it was genuine spam.

As the wet weather continues, perfectly synchronised to my available days, I have realised that no more progress is likely to be made until September. I still need to cut the grass, pull up the weeds, feed the plants and clear up after the cats, and there is hardly any time left after doing these maintenance tasks.

However, sometimes I realise that a planned task doesn’t need to be done just yet. For example, I was thinking that I had better prune my hibiscus, which I grew from seed about 13 years ago, and which is partly blocking the path to my house. (The photograph is taken from the side; the house behind the shrub is my neighbour’s). The tree to the left of the hibiscus is the Magnolia Grandiflora that I also grew from seed about 13 years ago.

This hibiscus needs pruning - but not just yet

Then one of my few clients over the summer made some admiring comments, and I realised that pruning the hibiscus now was a pretty stupid idea. I will wait until it finishes flowering.

The deadline for my preparatory work before calling the landscapers in is the beginning of December. If August is a wipe-out, that still leaves me with three months to do the work, and at that time of year there should be less maintenance work needed. So it’s not a lost cause yet. At work this week I had my appraisal, and despite the fact that my manager has read some of my blog, she still set me some objectives, in the apparent belief that I would get them done. So at least she still has faith in me.

I have been receiving some rather odd spam comments in the past couple of weeks. They are all from random-looking usernames, such as qjoowtuh, rrgmecvum and zxabxdare. The comments themselves are like the usernames, and they point to web addresses that don’t exist, like http://ccfzjldvbfjz.com. (It is not a good idea to put a spammer’s web address into your browser to find out whether it exists or not, but you can visit http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ and type the address into their box, which as far as I know is a perfectly safe way of finding whether a site exists or not). When I get a spam comment, I normally add the IP to my blocked list, but these all come from different IPs, which makes me think they are faked or belong to PCs in a botnet. What really gets me about this spam is that I can’t see what the purpose of it is. If anyone has any ideas about what the spammers are trying to do, I would be interested to hear them.

And finally, one of my water butts has sprung a leak. At first I thought it must be coming from the tap, but when I looked closer I saw that there was a very small crack in the plastic quite near the bottom. The water will be under high pressure there most of the time, and I am wondering what I can do about it. I might be able to paint some kind of sealant on it. I will have a look in B&Q.

I don’t know why I keep paying attention to what the Met Office says any more. They said we were going to have a milder than average winter, and everything froze solid in January and February. Then they’ve said we are going to have a hot and dry summer. Ever since the heatwave it’s rained almost every day.

The rain has been helpful in a way because I haven’t had to do much watering. I would say that I haven’t had to do any watering, but that’s not quite true. A few days ago, after doing no watering at all, I discovered that my buddleia and two of my cornuses (all in pots) were drooping. One of the cornuses looked as if it was about to cark it, but I watered it, and it was looking much better the next day. I decided to take some cornus cuttings as a backup. I am not much good at taking cuttings, apart from pelargonium cuttings, but sometimes I succeed.

I have been able to snatch odd moments in the garden in between showers and thunderstorms. In fact, I managed three hours on Friday morning, and then had the satisfaction of watching it tip it down in the afternoon. However, I have not managed to make much renovation progress. It’s all about trying to keep the weeds from taking over and keeping everything in check. Now that I have weeded all my plant pots, the plants are taking advantage of the extra space and some could do with bigger pots. I pruned the wisteria. I know this isn’t supposed to happen until late summer, but I expect that the chap who invented that rule didn’t have a wisteria that had wrapped itself around a drainpipe in the hope of pulling it off the wall. (What is it with wisterias and drainpipes? Why can’t they just accept one another and live in peace?)

My friend Aubrey has given me a water pistol for the cats. Not having had a mis-spent youth, I wasn’t sure how to use it, but it didn’t take me long to work it out. You fill the reservoir with water and then use the pump to build up the pressure. You have to use the pump between each shot. The spray won’t go right to the end of the garden, but it will certainly go about halfway. To my great disappointment, I have not yet got a single cat. They obviously associate with children who are having a mis-spent youth and know exactly what I am pointing at them. Eventually I won’t need the pistol at all, and I will just have to open a window to make them run away.

The heatwave carried on today, and so did I. I drilled holes in the bottoms of seven big square planters and repotted thuja in two of them. Well, it’s a start. I also continued to tidy up the Portable Herbaceous Border and it’s looking much better. I’ll take a photo when I’ve finished. In the meantime, here is a picture of the left hand edge of my garden. Between the fence and the path there is just enough soil for plants to get in. Usually it’s weeds, but right now there is a good sized colony of lychnis, which is a grey-leaved plant with bright magenta flowers. I will weed this edge by hand rather than use glyphosate, because a line of lychnis by the fence would be absolutely lovely.

Lychnis by the fence and majoram on the right, in bright sunshine

The cats are still causing me problems. I think people should need planning permission to keep a cat. After all, if I decided to run a chip-making factory from my home, the Council would close me down if the neighbours didn’t like the smell. And the messes the cats leave behind smell far worse than chips. One or two cats would be all right (although I’d prefer none at all) but I think there are six or seven using my garden as a toilet at the moment. Once the density of cats exceeds, say, one cat per 1000 square metres, the Council should refuse permission for anyone in the area to acquire any more cats, or anyone to bring a cat when they move into the area.

I have used two supposed cat repellents: Get Off, which consists of green crystals with a soapy smell, and something else, which consists of small grey pellets which smell of garlic. I suppose that to test them properly I should set aside two areas of bare earth, apply a cat repellent to one patch and not the other, and count the number of little piles left in each area the next day. But I can’t be bothered to do that, and anyway my criteria for success are very stringent: no piles of any size at all, ever! It’s possible that the repellents may reduce the number of piles by half, for all I know, but that’s not good enough.

The only thing that has consistently worked for keeping the cats away is a physical barrier. For example, compost bags sewn together, or old pond liner, weighted down with rubble.

My attempts to keep the cats from fouling the area where the old pond was

The cats then tend to foul just under the edge if they can peel it back, or on top of the barrier at the edge, but this is much less than if they had access to the whole area. I tried leaving marjoram trimmings in a bare area (see the front left of the picture), thinking that the smell might put the cats off, but no – they just pooed right next to it.

Around the thuja, I have also used a plastic barrier, but I have also added in a few prunings from my neighbours’ shrubs, some of which are spiny. (Yes, I know that the prunings legally belong to my neighbours, but I feel confident that they aren’t expecting me to give them back). I think that when I start planting the area, my best hope will be spiny shrub cuttings, as there will be only small areas of soil between the plants.

My attempts to keep the cats away from the thuja

With the decrease in available toilet space, the cats now poo on my lawn, or on top of my stepping stones in between the compost bins. This is still annoying, but at least it is easy to clear up.

As an alternative to requiring planning permission to keep a cat, another way of stopping the nuisance is to require all cat owners to feed their cats gold pellets daily. This would encourage owners to try to get their cats to do their business in their litter trays, but if the cats still preferred to perform their functions elsewhere, at least the garden owners would get automatic compensation for the unpleasantness.

And finally… I have officially lost the Annual Willowherb Elimination Stakes once again. I found at least two willowherb plants with fluffy seed heads today. I will still keep going because the fewer seeds the better, but the trophy is once again with the willowherb. Maybe next year my luck will change.

The Met Office has arranged for us to have a heatwave this week. We may be getting some heavy showers on Friday, but in the meantime it is important to make sure that nothing collapses from heat exhaustion, including me.

Gardening in a heatwave is fine as long as you follow these simple rules:
(1) Go out as early in the morning as you can manage, and go indoors at eleven o’clock to have a nice cup of tea. Or, if you are unlucky enough not to have the week off work, go out in the evening, but you will have to wear insect repellent and put up with stinky barbecues.
(2) Don’t attempt to move much soil, or swing a pickaxe. Just do some nice gentle pruning, weeding and repotting.
(3) Wear a hat. You can even walk to the shops wearing a hat and no one will laugh at you.
(4) Drink plenty of water as you go along.
(5) Work very slowly. Remember that if it were raining, you wouldn’t be doing any work at all, so anything you can do is a bonus.

The willowherb competition is still wide open. The willowherb could win it by miles, or by kilometres, or by inches. There were some patches of soil which were so hard and dry that I decided to cheat by spraying the area with glyphosate to get rid of the weeds, but I did remove all the willowherb by hand first.

I am worried about the thuja that I planted last year. I started watering it a few weeks ago, and am wondering whether I should have started earlier. There are brown patches on the leaves. However, most of the leaves look healthy and the plants are evidently growing. I shall be giving them a good drenching three times a week while the heatwave lasts.

I fed all my potted plants today, apart from the lime-hating ones, which get a specialist slow-release feed made of pellets. I have used up all my Wilkinson’s Wondergro, so I decided to try some B&Q general purpose liquid plant food. The Wondergro is a crystalline solid, which takes time to dissolve. The liquid doesn’t need to dissolve. However, it is much easier to spill the liquid on the patio than it is to spill the solid. The biggest disadvantage of the liquid is its price. Presumably it is similar in quality to the solid. However, it costs about the same price for 180 litres of food solution as the solid does for 900 litres of food solution. I used more than half the bottle this morning (I have so very many leaves to feed) so I shall have to buy some more, and I think I’ll get some more of the solid next time. The plants are supposed to get fed every week, but considering that they didn’t get fed at all last summer, I think they will be happy enough with once a fortnight.

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 state of my garden in June 2009

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:

Greenhouse and temporary pond

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

I know it’s almost a month since my last entry, but that’s because the exams have been approaching. The second and last GCSE maths paper is tomorrow (that’s the linear course – the modular course isn’t over yet) and I said goodbye to five GCSE students last week. One of them gave me a gorgeous, utterly lovely lupin. I have never tried to grow a lupin yet, and so far I have to admit I haven’t done too well. I put it outside on Wednesday evening, and on Saturday morning it was hanging its head and leaves and looking thoroughly sorry for itself. So I put it in a saucer so it can have plenty of water, and this evening (Sunday) it is looking much better. I shall repot it into a bigger pot so it can have a better chance of surviving in the harsh environment of my Portable Herbaceous Border, which does not get watered every day, and never will. At least I realised that it was going to get eaten by slugs (I don’t know how I knew, but I did know) and sprinkled the pot liberally with slug pellets, so it hasn’t.

Since my last post I have taken delivery of 20 bags of organic compost from the excellent Compost Centre (http://www.thecompostcentre.co.uk/). I ordered them by telephone, and the bags arrived one day while I was at work, and I sent off a cheque. Much easier than making several car journeys to buy them from somewhere else. I don’t know whether I will need all 20 bags for this phase of the project, but if not, they will keep until the next phase.

This morning I had a blog-related shock. I noticed on Friday that my helenpercy.com POP and SMTP servers weren’t working, but I found I could still access my webmail, so I decided to wait a while and contact my hosting company, UKHost4u, if they didn’t start working again. This morning I tried to access my blog, and I got a parking page from some horrible little outfit that had taken over my domain name. I nearly passed out in horror. When I had collected myself enough, I checked that my renewal invoice had been paid, and then contacted UKHost4u to ask them what had happened. I also checked on WHOIS (http://domains.whois.com/domain.php?action=whois) and saw that the domain registration had expired on Thursday – three days ago.

Fortunately this all had a happy ending. I had thought that if someone forgets to renew their domain name and some vulture jumps in and takes it, then the person has lost it. But actually it says on the Internet in various places that there is a thirty-day grace period on .com domains before anyone else is allowed to take over the domain. And when I contacted UKHost4u, they replied almost immediately, saying that the billing system hadn’t renewed the domain and they would do it now, and the website would be back online within 24 hours. The website was back within twenty minutes, and the WHOIS entry was updated too.

Despite the deleterious effect on my blood pressure, I would still recommend UKHost4u as a hosting service because I believe that the measure of any organisation or service is not whether it makes mistakes (subject to reasonable limits), but how well it deals with those mistakes.

Moving from the virtual world back to the real one, my two main gardening problems at the moment are weeds and cats. Of these, I think the cats are troubling me more. I am well used to weeds, and at least they grow in a predictable manner and don’t smell.

The cats, on the other hand, are out of control. I think they must be fighting to own the territory of my garden, and unfortunately they don’t do this simply by biffing each other or chasing each other away, but by trying to turn it into the locality’s biggest toilet. The most effective way of preventing them from doing this is to cover any bare patches of soil with polythene, weighted down round the edges with bits of rubble. Earlier this week I cut up four compost bags and sewed them together with my grandmother’s terylene thread. Artificial fibres are less likely to rot than cotton, and also it’s easier to sew with them because they don’t tangle as easily. I will do this with all my compost bags as I use the contents. As I gradually cover over more and more of the garden, the cats are getting desperate. This morning I saw that they had used the small patches of earth between my stepping stones near the compost bins as their latest latrine. And they had used it very, very thoroughly. It must have been the joint efforts of several cats.

The problem may ease if one cat becomes dominant and the others keep out of my garden. However, I don’t know if this is going to happen any time soon. I am going to be in trouble when I get the lawn made and when I plant my shrubs behind it if I don’t find some way of stopping the cats from performing their biological functions. For the shrubs, I may have to use a membrane, like they do in gardening makeover programmes. For the lawn, I can keep the area wet – I’ll sow the seed in April, before it gets very hot – and possibly use cat repellent, although I have not much confidence it works. Netting is also a possibility, although I’ll need a lot. Perhaps I may have to dig a patch elsewhere in the garden as a sacrifice – if the cats can use that, they may keep off the areas I am working on.

But for now my priorities are to keep the Portable Herbaceous Border alive – that means repotting some of the plants – and carrying on with the renovation work while keeping the weeds down and clearing up after the cats.

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.

Greenhouse wiring with control box and one double plug point

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.

Greenhouse lighting detail

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

Greenhouse with lightbulb

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

Greenhouse with wiring in place

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.

Yesterday I managed to dig up and remove the tree stump, at last. I am very pleased. I did it by cutting through all the side roots and digging out the soil from under the stump with a trowel. It was then possible to push the stump over, and any remaining roots were so rotten that they just broke under the force of gravity. I am now much better at chopping through wood with a mattock. It feels quite easy, but I can tell it’s hard work because I seem to need a lot of oxygen to do it. After I had pushed the tree stump over, I sat down for a breather and took this photograph. You can’t see the tape measure markings, but at least the width of the tape gives a sense of scale.

Tree stump after I dug it out

I then had to get the tree stump out of the hole. The weight of it is right on the limit of what I can lift, so I couldn’t just lift it out of the hole. Fortunately, since the hole was quite big, it was quite easy to get the stump out. I rolled the stump to one side, and then added some soil to the other side of the hole. I rolled the stump slightly uphill to the other side, and then added some soil to the side of the hole that had just been vacated. I carried on doing this until the stump was near enough to the surface around the hole for me to roll it out. I rolled it over to the other side of the garden and put it next to the bay tree, out of the way. I could carry on smashing it up with the mattock, but I think I will put some stuff on it that accelerates the rotting of tree stumps, and then try to pick it up in a year’s time, and see if it falls apart in my hands.

While removing the stump, I found a new complication. Some bees have made a nest in my excavations. When I finish filling in the hole, it will block their nest, which they will not be very pleased about. Killing bees is a bad thing to do, but delaying projects is also bad. I tried to get them to pose for a photograph, but as you would expect of bees, they were very busy. This was the best I could do.

Bees in nest made in wall of excavations

I then went indoors and looked the bees up on the Internet. They are most likely to be miner bees, which can’t sting people because their stings don’t penetrate the skin. And best of all, they will buzz off some time towards the end of May. If I block up their nest, then their babies might have difficulty getting out, but perhaps I can move the babies, if I can find them. So I am going to carry on working and try to avoid the nest for now.

In my last post I said that it was difficult to find time to renovate the garden because the demand for tuition was building up. This is still true, but the garden has now decided that it’s time for Spring and is slowing my progress by producing weeds, especially dandelions and bittercress, and by growing (the grass is the main culprit here). All these things need attention, and that reduces the time available I have for the Garden Renovation Project. I have had to repot the Very Badly Taken pelargonium cuttings because they can’t go outside until the end of May. I have also decided to sow some tomatoes this year. My parents gave me some very large pots and I will put the tomatoes in them, which will reduce the need for weeding, and I’ll probably be able to get away with only watering them every two days, unless it is very hot, because the pots are so large.

In case anyone thought that the reason I haven’t mentioned the magnolia which I dug up and stuck in a pot is that it has died, it hasn’t. It hasn’t produced as many flowers as last year, but it’s made a jolly good effort and here it is.

Magnolia in pot with flowers

So, although I was out for two hours this morning, I didn’t make much progress with the tree stump. After the recent hot weather, it seems to have dried out a bit around the edges, so I sawed off a few slices. I am trying to dig it out but that’s quite a lot of work as well. I think that if I can dispose of it by the end of May, I will be doing well.