Helen's Garden Renovation Project

I keep reading that this summer is very wet, but after last summer, my idea of what a wet summer means has been radically recalibrated. Yes, it has rained a bit, but I have made a much better job of keeping on top of the weeds than I did last year, because I have sometimes had a chance to go out and pull them up. And I haven’t had to do much watering of pots or of the new planting in the communal areas outside my house, so I am not complaining. I have bought a Vulkan Tennis Elbow Brace from Amazon (is there anything they don’t sell?) and that has allowed me to carry on weeding and pruning in reasonable comfort.

Not only are the weeds being pulled up, but progress, although very slow, is being made. Here was my plan of February 2007:

(1) Get the air conditioning unit moved. DONE.

(2) Get the side passage paved over and remove posts in far corner where greenhouse will go. DONE

(3) Install water butts. DONE.

(4) Buy and assemble tool store. DONE apart from needing a shelf.

(5) Put tools in tool store and tidy up garage. NOT DONE YET.

(6) Order greenhouse and get it installed. NOT DONE YET.

I can now refine the plan as follows (the tasks do not necessarily have to be executed in the given order):

(1) Remove the four Leylandii trees at the right-hand end of the hedge and replace with Thuja plicata. This is part of my plan to renew the whole hedge in three stages.

(2) Work out where greenhouse is going to go.

(3) Tidy up garage to make room for greenhouse. This may involve getting another tool store and putting a shelf in the existing tool store.

(4) Order greenhouse.

(5) Dig trench for cable.

(6) Get quote for work to lay base for greenhouse, put it up and wire it up to the mains.

(7) Get work done.

Today I trimmed some branches off the Leylandii that are going to get dug up, and worked out where the greenhouse is supposed to go. To avoid copyright problems, I have redrawn the part of the plan that deals with the right-hand back corner of the garden and here it is:

I stuck four bamboo canes into the ground at the corners of the square enclosing the octagonal greenhouse, where the four pairs of dotted lines meet in the plan. Here are two photographs. The first is taken looking towards the back fence, at a slight angle so you can see behind the bay tree (the big green shrub at the right of the picture).

Greenhouse location looking towards the back fence

And this one is taken looking from the side.

Greenhouse location from side

You may not be able to see it from these photographs, but there is a slight hitch in the plan. The bay tree is growing where the arch is supposed to go. The greenhouse cannot go any closer to the back fence because I need access to the compost bin in the corner, and because there needs to be access to the hedge to keep it trimmed. I have been thinking about my options.

(1) Murder the bay tree and put the greenhouse and arch where the plan says.

(2) Keep the bay tree and move the greenhouse further away from the side wall so there is room for the arch.

(3) Keep the bay tree and don’t move the greenhouse, but put the arch somewhere else, or don’t have it.

I don’t want to move the greenhouse, as that will reduce the space I have for growing vegetables and will result in wasted space between the fence and the greenhouse where nothing will grow. So I have to decide whether I want an arch or a bay tree next to the greenhouse. The bay tree is one of the few mature shrubs still remaining in the garden, and I am inclined to leave it where it is, and then see how it looks next to the greenhouse. On the other hand, if I am definitely going to get rid of it, it would be a lot easier to dig it up before digging the trench for the cable. And it is rather big. Although I definitely want a bay tree (I use its leaves in cooking) I could manage perfectly well with a smaller one grown in a pot or restricted space. I don’t actually have to murder it: I could cut it right back and prune its roots and stick it in a pot, just like the magnolia (which still seems perfectly happy – see the first of the two photographs in this post) or I could dig up one of the small offshoots near its base and plant that in a pot instead. One thing is for sure – despite my guilt at dispatching a healthy and beautiful plant, it will be heaven to chop it up, with that gorgeous aromatic scent from its leaves.

All right, I’m not exactly a wanderer, although I have been on a week’s holiday since the last post. It’s just that the longer I left it, the less I felt like writing a post. Also, I wanted to move the blog from its original home in hmptuition.com because that domain is meant to be for work (maths tuition), and I didn’t want to write any new posts until I had completed the move. And so on, etc.

Anyway, I have achieved some small but noticeable progress this summer. I have at last got myself a shed. This shed was delivered in March, but then I had to paint it before assembling it, according to the instructions. And I did! Really. I painted each side of everything with two coats of Ducksback in red cedar and it took ages. Then I looked at the feasibility of putting it together, and decided that I needed some help, so I rang up a nice man who lectures in carpentry at a local college and got him to come round with his bag of tools. The job took three hours, which is surprising when my neighbour said that two men who came to erect her big shed did it in twenty minutes. Well, I suppose they were specialists. The result is rather nice-looking.

My new tool store

I now have the pleasant job of deciding what to put in it, and whether I want to buy another tool store: a taller one that will be able to house longer things like a rake. I also have to think about security. The new shed has a padbolt, but it is not very secure because the burglar just has to unscrew the screws to get in. In a few years’ time this won’t matter because the screws will be so rusty that no one will be able to shift them, but that doesn’t solve the problem now. I may take the padbolt off and fit it with something with concealed screws, like a hasp. For now, I won’t put anything remotely valuable in there. I am also wondering about whether I should put chemicals in there. The temperatures are likely to be more extreme in both summer and winter than they are in the garage.

One reason I needed help with the shed is that I have tennis elbow. I had thought this was not a particularly common injury, but so many people I have spoken to have said that they or their husbands have had it. It’s always men. So far I am the only woman I know who has had this injury. I think I got it through weight training, which I think is unfair because I haven’t increased the intensity of my training for many years. My neighbour (not the one who employed the jet-propelled shed erectors) is a pharmacist and when her husband got tennis elbow she looked at the evidence-based research and found that the only thing that works is rest. So I am resigned to not doing too much pruning and weeding, but I have been rubbing some voltarol gel into my elbow in the hope of benefitting from a placebo effect.

With only one A level exam still to go (Core 4 Maths on 12 June) I am now seeing very few students. I have now got time to look out of the window, see the garden and weep. I have to admit, though, that unless there is a drought, crying is not a very good way of dealing with a neglected garden. I have been going out with my secateurs, shears and trowel to try and do something about it. However, progress so far has been minimal, as every time I go outside, I get chatting with one of other of the neighbours, since they haven’t seen me recently any more than the garden has.

Still, this morning I managed to go and have a good hack at the ivy before anyone else got up, and all I can do is to keep working at the weeds and overgrown plants. If we get some fine weather this week, I will make a start at painting the shed, and then I may even be able to nail it together and put things in it.

A few days ago I was potting on my euonymus cuttings when I found a nasty surprise. In fact, a few nasty surprises. They were little white bugs in the compost. Afterwards I looked them up in my RHS Gardening Encyclopaedia, but I already knew what they were. Vine weevil. The good news is that there is very little evidence of damage to any of my plants, so with luck I have caught them early. I shall have to go to Wilkinson’s to find something to kill them with. I have read that there is a special sort of compost you can buy that kills vine weevil, but that’s no good for me because (1) it only works for one year and (2) you have to wash all the old compost off the roots and not mix it with anything. I always mix my compost with garden soil and I have no intention of repotting everything every year.

Just for once I can’t complain about the rain because we are in the middle of a heatwave. I have been out watering the plants in the communal areas every two days. Unfortunately I have to use a watering can because my hose doesn’t reach far enough, so I am now hoping that we get some rain soon. There is lots to do in my garden – mainly weeding – but I decided today that I would transplant some of the campanula in the front garden to the area under my Discovery apple tree. If it grows as vigorously in its new position as it does in the front, I will not have to do any weeding until the Plan reaches that area of the garden. The problem with this plan is that the campanula may not be too happy about being transplanted in the middle of a heatwave. I decided to try anyway in the interests of furthering my gardening knowledge, given that there is effectively an infinite supply of campanula in the front garden, so the only thing I lose if it dies is my labour.

My scheme to plant as much marjoram as possible underneath the other apple tree, Charles Ross, has been very successful.

However, the poor apple tree is upset with me about something and has refused to blossom this year, so I won’t be getting any apples. I hope it’s not because it doesn’t like marjoram.

It is now the end of April, and in a month’s time it should be safe to plant my half hardy annuals outside. Avid readers of this blog will recall that last year I sowed some hardy annuals in a patch of ground that I intended to dig up the following autumn. However, slippage on the project meant that the patch of ground did not get dug up after all, and this year I have decided to plant half hardy annuals instead, on the grounds that I can zap the ground with glyphosate to keep the weeds down until the plants are ready to go out, and because they will be quite big when I plant them, they should be able to compete with the new weeds better than the hardy annuals did.

I can now report on the disadvantages of the half hardy annuals strategy. The main one is the difficulty of finding enough places in the house that get enough light to stop the seedlings becoming too spindly. As you can see from the picture, some of mine are a bit straggly. It is possible that they might have grown better if the room had been cooler.

If I had my greenhouse, I could put the plants in there during the day and take them back into the house at night (to save on heating the greenhouse while the nights are still quite cold) and then there wouldn’t be this problem.

However, apart from the light problem, the half hardy annual strategy is quite a good one. The labour involved in pricking out the seedlings is nothing compared to the amount of weeding I had to do last year, and if I had planted the larger seeds (salvia and dahlia) into separate plugs or pots I wouldn’t have had to prick them out yet. I won’t bother trying to grow petunias from seed again, as they are far too weak and feeble.

There is also the small problem that it keeps raining whenever I have any free time to do things in the garden. This means that I haven’t put any glyphosate on the area where the seedlings will be planted yet. However, there is still time to do this.

The problem with light has made me more determined to do everything I can to get the greenhouse installed this winter. The main thing is to install the shed first, so that I can move tools from the garage to the shed, thus releasing space to store the greenhouse when it arrives until the time when I can have it assembled. Unfortunately, the rain has been something of an obstacle to this task. I also need to start renewing the Leylandii hedge with thuja, and I want to dig up the trees that will be behind the greenhouse before the greenhouse is installed, so they don’t fall on the greenhouse.

Last Saturday I happened to go to the library, and Fleet Market was just outside, and I just happened to see some plants that looked nice, so I impulse-bought a dwarf lilac rhododendron and also a euonymus of a type I don’t remember seeing before. The baby leaves of the euonymus are literally pure white, and then they become green and white variegated. I looked on Google Images, and I think it is euonymus fortunei ‘Harlequin’. I have already planted the rhododendron in the border by the side of the house, along with the red one that I got from B&Q two weeks ago, but no, I do not know where I am going to put the euonymus. The rhododendron was £3 and the euonymus was £2. Excellent value.

Apologies for the over-exposure, which is caused by me not being a very good photographer.

Last weekend I went to visit my parents. On the way back I called in at Pantiles Nursery. I found out about them through the RHS Plant Finder. My main purpose was to see if they had a Feijoa, but I fancied having a little browse and see what else they had. Unfortunately I was disappointed on two counts. Firstly, although their shrubs claimed to be arranged in A-Z order, I couldn’t work out what their rule was for deciding what went where. I eventually asked for help to find the Feijoa. I can’t fault the quality of the help, especially as the man knew that the plant was also called Acca, which is very helpful for trying to find one in people’s catalogues, but I like to be able to look for things on my own. The second reason for disappointment was that all the plants were very big, with very big price tags to match. This is very good for impatient people who want to build a garden in a weekend, or people who have not much longer to live and who want to spend their last few months looking at huge plants in their garden, but no good for the Garden Renovation Project, which is on a budget and does not spend money when it can get things cheaper by waiting a few years. Anyway, the smallest Feijoa was priced at £46, so I think I will probably be buying one by mail order.

However, the weekend was not a total plant disaster, as Morrison’s were offering a very unusual viola, with purple-edged white flowers, for only 99p. Also, B&Q had a small azalea, helpfully if unimaginatively named “Red”, which will fit very nicely in my shady front-side border.

This weekend I was dragged away from the Garden Renovation Project to help with planting the new landscaping for the communal area shared by my neighbours and me. When I woke up at half past five, my heart sank because I could hear heavy rain. However, by nine o’clock the rain was over and the sun was out. Susie set out the plants. Here is a picture of one of the three areas that we planted.

Since I had saved some time by sorting the plants out yesterday according to where they were going to go, Susie and I planted the smallest area together and Susie took a picture of me looking pleased with myself. Then, as previously agreed, she went home and left us to it.

At half past ten the enthusiastic members of the working party arrived and we got on with the job. Susie had told me that there were 61 plants, and that at the rate of two minutes per plant, this would take two people just over an hour. Sadly, the assumption of two minutes to plant a plant was wildly optimistic. For one thing, I struck concrete at one point, and ended up levering out a kerbstone with a crowbar. This took a good few minutes. Some of the holes were hard to dig because tree roots were in the way. Some of them were hard to dig because of bricks in the way. Very few of them were easy to dig. There was also the problem of trying to get the levels right. There was a layer of bark on top of the soil and in some places it was three inches thick. It was hard to work out how deep to dig the hole to get the plant at the right level. And of course, it was a messy business scraping aside the bark and then putting it back. One thing which we were unable to work out was how we were supposed to get root-balls whose total volume must have come to some 300 litres, plus 800 litres of compost, into the soil without raising the soil level significantly. Perhaps that can be my next gardening maths problem.

At half past twelve I had to leave the site, but at this stage we still had over twenty plants still to plant. We had planted nearly all the biggest ones, so we were more than two-thirds of the way through, but this was still slippage on a massive scale. Fortunately, my neighbours managed to plant all the rest of the plants during the day, and no one so far has glared at me for disappearing off early.

I have never attempted any planting on this scale before, and I have learned the following lessons from the experience:

(1) If possible, dig out all the rubble from the site yourself. Do not pay anyone else to do it because they probably won’t. If you cannot remove it all yourself and have to pay someone, follow behind their rotavator or mini-digger with a fork and throw all the rubble into the back of their truck.

(2) Do not accept any planting commissions that are near a tree that is over 40 foot high, especially if it has a Tree Preservation Order (TPO) on it. If it has not got a TPO on it, you will have a tough time cutting through all the roots. If it has a TPO on it you will not be allowed to cut through any roots that are thicker than your forearm, so you will have to keep digging until you find a large enough gap to put your plant in.

(3) Do not put bark all over the area before planting things. This is just plain silly.

(4) If there is bark all over the area, you can make the job tidier by first removing bark from the place you want to plant, and heaping up the soil from the hole onto an empty bag of compost.

(5) Do not underestimate the physical task of lifting pots, shovelling earth and so on. If you are not used to it, three hours is a long time to spend planting things. Chocolate biscuits are a great help, however.

(6) The easiest way to improve soil quality is to spread a thin layer of compost across the surface of the soil (see comment 3) and let the worms do the digging for you. It is quite hard to use enough compost if you just put some into the bottom of the planting hole, because you still have to get all the soil you dug out back into the hole, as well as the plant, and there just isn’t enough space.

Today (Sunday) began with torrential snow. Our plants were covered.

However, the snow didn’t last long. And all the plants are very hardy.

Today I had a complete day off work, and the sun was shining, and it was actually warm! So this morning I did some nursery maintenance. I dug up three fritillaria that were flowering around my pond to salvage them from the demolition that will happen one day. I saw that the campanula portenschlangiana was growing very vigorously, so I chopped it into five pieces. I looked at the waldsteinia, which is putting in an application for world domination, and remembered being worried about possibly killing it when I chopped it up. This is definitely a plant to put in the shade and hope that the lack of light calms it down. Goodness knows what it will do if it gets put in the sun. I was slightly tempted to dig up at least one of my hellebores and make it into about five, but it was flowering so beautifully and peacefully that I couldn’t bear to.

Two days ago I pricked out my dahlia seedlings. I have put most of them into a 24-compartment plug tray and the rest into small pots. Given the very high germination rate, if I ever grow dahlias again, I will sow the seeds in individual plug compartments or pots. Most of my seedlings have survived being pricked out, but there is always a risk of damage when the plants are very small. I think I would do the same with salvia, which also has a very high germination rate. I am quite confident about the survival of everything I have sown apart from the petunias, which have very feeble looking seedlings that I think would die if you shouted at them too loudly. I shall see how I get on, but maybe a petunia is a plant that is better to buy as a plug plant than as a seed.

Today there was some additional plant excitement because our consignment of plants for the communal area outside my house had arrived. I don’t think I mentioned before that Alborough Garden Design, the firm we employed to do the whole job, sadly went bust after they had laid our turf and dug over the shrubberies but before they had worked out a detailed planting plan. So we had to find someone else to complete the job. I asked my usual landscaping contractor whether he could recommend a garden designer, and he put me in touch with Susie Bower. Susie has chosen some really lovely things that you wouldn’t see on an average estate. This makes it much more exciting. Because the firm that went bust was cheaper than everyone else, we had to make our budget stretch a bit further, and we did this by agreeing that we would do the planting ourselves. So tomorrow I am hoping that enough people will brave the cold and come and dig some holes.

Note added later: Sadly Susie Bower is no longer in business as a garden designer. This is a great shame, as she did a great job not just for us, but for two of my friends too.

Here is a picture of the magnolia soulangeana that I cruelly dug up and viciously pruned last year. Doesn’t it look really fed up?

A gardening expert has kindly told me that magnolias hate being pruned and stuck in pots, and that the reason it is flowering is that it is just about to give up the ghost and that it hopes that if it has lots of children someone will be nicer to them than I was. Sadly, I realise this may be true. So I am making sure that I look at it lots of times in case this is the last spring it ever sees.

My tool store arrived just under two weeks ago, but I haven’t assembled it yet because the instructions say that it wants to be painted at least once and preferably twice with decorative wood finish before it is put together. I might have done that this morning, except that it rained heavily from about half past five until about midday. I shall have to wait for a clear day so it has a chance to dry after being painted. I think I shall probably also have to buy some more wood paint.

On Friday morning I checked my propagators again, and found that the salvia and antirrhinums had got going, so that means all types of seed have started to germinate in under six days. So much for the 14-28 days on the packets. Another time I may do some experiments to see if I can get a seed to wait for 14 days before germinating, just to see if it is possible. Maybe the instructions on the packets were written by the same people who claim that their printer prints 20 pages per minute.