Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Dave, usually described in these posts as “my very patient boyfriend”, died on 12 April this year. I had been thinking about whether I should include this sad event in my blog, as it is meant to be about gardening and not about tragedy. But each time I think about my garden plans, and especially the pond, I think about Dave and how much time I spent discussing the plans with him, and how much we would have enjoyed sitting by the edge of the pond and seeing who could spot the most newts. Although Dave didn’t do any of the Renovation, he helped to obtain some of the plants and he was very much involved in the planning. When the pond is built, there will be other people to show it to, but there won’t be Dave.

At the time of Dave’s death, the garden was waking up after one of the longest, deepest winters that I can remember. The jasmine, which I thought was dead, started producing little shoots. The sun shone from dawn to dusk and the rain stayed away for days on end. It seemed impossible that anyone could die when everything was so bright, so alive, so energetic. I made my trips to and from the hospital, and still the sun shone, and I felt that surely Dave could not leave my life now, not when everything was beginning again.

But Dave is gone, and the garden is still shoving out more shoots than it knows what to do with, and the pond will be built, and the newts will move in, and maybe one day, when I look down and see my reflection in the water, maybe just for a moment I will see Dave’s next to mine, as if he were looking into the pond with me.

Until now, I have been writing plant names on white plastic labels in pencil. This is fine up to a point, but the writing eventually fades or washes off, and then if the plant dies I don’t know what it was before it died. So I bought a Brother GL-200 plant labelling machine.

Plant labeller with adaptor and sample output

It is very easy to use. Although it’s obviously not as quick as scribbling on the label with pencil, it’s still quite quick. It also offers flexibility in typeface and size of type. The only thing I would suggest to improve it would be an RHS-approved spell checker (see sample label). After I printed off “Campanula Portenschlagiana” I found that this was not going to fit on a label stick, so I changed to narrow type instead. This is perfectly readable and saves tape, so I have done it with shorter names too.

Some of my plant labels printed this morning

I bought the plant labeller from Labelzone because they offered the cheapest price I could find, and they had a UK address and no obvious spelling mistakes on their site, so looked respectable. They delivered exactly what I’d ordered very quickly, so definitely deserve a mention on my blog. Also deserving of a mention is Battery Logic, where I bought eight Uniross Hybrio rechargeable AAA batteries. Although I have an adaptor for the plant labeller, the batteries enable me to use the labeller where there isn’t a convenient plug point, and will save anything stored in the memory. I ordered the batteries on Thursday afternoon and got them on Friday, which was incredibly good.

This morning it rained (thanks again, Met Office, for your summer predictions) and so I got some labels printed. I think I am going to use all the tape that came with the machine, so it’s a good thing I bought a spare cartridge as well. It’s important to use the Chain Print function when printing out a lot of labels or the printer wastes a lot of tape by leaving large gaps between each label.

My prediction about the water pistol in my last entry has proved to be true: the cats now run away as soon as I open the window. Next, they will see me at the window, and as soon as I move away they will know I’ve gone to get the key, and will have run away before I even get as far as opening the window.

I have now come to the end of my summer holiday-at-home and what a week it has been. I have spent an average of about two and a half hours in the garden every day and it has been glorious. My arms are a tasteful brown colour and I have no sunburn, which is just as well, because otherwise when I returned to work (the Health Promotion Resource Library) next week, I would have to give myself a leaflet.

As previously announced, the willowherb wins the Annual Willowherb Elimination Stakes trophy for the thirteenth successive year. However, I would like to draw your attention to the following:

Pots stacked tidily in side alley by sheds instead of being randomly scattered throughout the garden

Also note the very tidily arranged Portable Herbaceous Border on a neatly swept patio.

Portable Herbaceous Border after weeding and tidying

And finally a view of the end of the garden. All right, so it would be greatly improved if I moved the compost bins and the bags of organic compost, but at least there are some pretty plants there enjoying the sunshine. The red flowers are from the Very Badly Taken Pelargonium Cuttings, which are mostly still in their pots because I don’t know where to plant them.

Flowers and compost bins

I said I wasn’t going to prune the apple trees, and I didn’t, but I think I really need to. This one is Charles Ross, and he is not in great shape. I shall have to find out when and how to do it. The green stuff underneath is marjoram. I was going to trim that back, and I did – a bit. You can see the hellebore at the bottom left of the picture. Before I trimmed back some of the marjoram, you wouldn’t have been able to.

Charles Ross, an apple tree in need of pruning

So that’s my holiday over, and the Gardening Renovation Project will now return to normal. Over the next two months I will be continuing to fight the willowherb and other weeds. I will finish filling in the old pond, and move the compost bins to their final destinations. Then I will get the plan out and work out exactly where the new lawn and pond are going to go, so I can find out how much path I need to take up.

On Sunday it was very windy and I was worried that the plastic shed was too light and could get blown over, so I decided to screw it to the wall before putting anything in it. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I had to go to work, and then it rained gently all day Thursday, so I had to wait until today. The first thing I did was to push the shed over a bit so that all the water drained off the roof onto the paving instead of onto my head. Then I noticed that the shed appeared to be leaning away from the wall, but then I realised that the paving must have been laid so it was sloping away from the wall, and I wedged some old tiles under the front of the shed, which made it line up with the wall. I thought I would have to drill through the plastic back of the shed, but when I looked I saw that there were a few pairs of recessed holes which looked as if they were meant to be used to screw the shed to something, so I used them.

I have to admit that, although I enjoy playing with my power drill, which was a 21st birthday present from my parents, I am not all that good at drilling holes. However, this time the operation didn’t go too badly. The main difficulty was that the holes in the plastic were some distance from the wall (because of the thickness of the plastic), which makes it difficult to mark where the holes are to be drilled in the wall. My usual technique is to bash a nail into the wall, making a small dent, but I couldn’t find the dents after I had done this, so I decided to use my smallest masonry bit to drill a little way into the wall without damaging the plastic, and then move the shed away and drill a bigger hole. I never know what size hole to drill, because it all depends on how neat a hole I manage to make, but I couldn’t get the plastic wall plugs into a 6.5mm hole so I drilled a 7mm hole, and then when I put my number 10 screws in, the wall plug came out of the right-hand hole so I had to nip down to the hardware shop to buy a 2 1/2 inch number 12 screw. (I already had some number 12s, but they weren’t long enough). I’m now convinced that the shed is stuck to the wall firmly enough to resist the average winter storm.

Although I was pleased to get this job done, I wouldn’t go as far as the Wikibooks entry (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:How_Things_Work/Screw). It has a series of questions and answers about the screw, and in answer to the question “How has it changed the world?” it replies, “It has made life worth living”.

I couldn’t quite believe it when I opened my curtains yesterday morning and saw how much white there was around. The snow had only settled on the grass and soil, not the paths or roads, but it was still an impressive effort for the time of year. I unwisely cycled to work, but did not fall off.

The day before yesterday I tried to persuade Wilkinson’s to give me a discount on a half-dead plant. It was a skimmia rubella, priced at £5.99. I am after a skimmia for my side border, in the dark next to the pulmonaria. I would prefer a female one, as I think the two male skimmia “Kew Green” planted in our residents’ landscaping would enjoy having a lady living across the road from them, but the male rubella is a good plant. For some reason, skimmias seem to be quite expensive, even for small plants, and had the plant been healthy, it would have been a bargain. But two stems were completely brown down to soil level and the soil was bone dry. I reckoned it had less than a 50% chance of survival (so slightly more than half dead) but for a couple of quid I was willing to take a chance. However, the best Wilkinson’s could offer me was 10% off, and I wasn’t taking those kind of odds. They’ve probably thrown the plant away now. Don’t they know there’s a recession on?

On the plus side, my plastic shed arrived this morning, and I have stowed it away in the garage until the weather gets warm enough for me to assemble it without dropping all the bits because my fingers are too numb to hold anything. I ordered it exactly a week ago, so well done to the Original Gift Company (aka Scotts of Stow).

I’ve had a cold and have been having a rest from gardening, although I did some tidying up yesterday. However, I have made some progress in that I have bought a second shed. I needed a tall one to go next to the short, fat, wide one, so I can put rakes and spades in it. A catalogue from “The Original Gift Company” came through my door, and when glancing through it before putting it into the recycling bin, I saw the perfect shed, called a ‘Sentry Shed’. It’s made of plastic, so doesn’t require drills and saws to put it together, and of course it won’t need painting. I had always assumed that gift catalogues contained entirely things that you would give to someone else but wouldn’t want yourself, but apparently not. Also it shows that junk mails works. Drat.

I decided to spend some of last year’s tutoring income on some new power tools. I decided that after keeping my patient boyfriend’s shredder for about a year, it was time I gave it back and bought my own. I bought a Bosch AXT 2200 HP Silent Garden Shredder. The picture on the box showed it eating a large shrub, so I decided to decorate mine with some Leylandii for this photograph.

Bosch 2200 HP Silent Garden Shredder

After a successful shredding session I feel able to make the following observations

(1) It is not silent but it is very quiet and peaceful sounding, until you give it a thick branch, when it sings a bit until it’s got through it.

(2) It’s best not to give it a whole shrub in one go, despite the picture on the box. The reason is that the shredding is done by a wheel with spiky bits on it, and you need to shove the branch through the right-hand side of the slot, which is the side that has the wheel edge going downwards. If you try and put it through the left-hand side of the slot, the wheel will just push it back out at you. If you trim off all the side branches to the right of the main stem and shove the stem in, it won’t get pushed to the left by the side branches and therefore it goes down much more easily.

(3) The shredder comes with a bag to collect the chippings, but I haven’t tried this because I have a handy blue cuboid bucket (see photo) which is just the right size. It takes very little time to fill it.

(4) If you want to use an extension lead, it needs to be able to take at least 10A.

(5) It doesn’t shred things into very tiny lumps, but for my purposes, it’s fine.

The shredder was very expensive (£250 from Amazon) but as I reckon I have forty years at least of gardening life still in me, it will be worth the money. Buying cheap shredders just leads to annoyance when things get stuck in them.

Next, I got out my Black and Decker GK1000 Alligator Loppers. This tool is basically a safe chainsaw, but it is still a chainsaw, and to me it looks scary. Note fearful grin in photograph, despite wearing safety equipment and, even safer, not plugging it in.

Alligator Loppers

I bought the loppers from Carl F because they had a really good price for them. When I enquired about the type of power supply, Carl F emailed back to me to say that they were battery powered, with two batteries, an intelligent one hour charger, a battery level indicator and a kit box. Wow, that sounds good, I thought. But when I got the loppers, I found that they just had an ordinary power lead. This doesn’t actually matter because batteries have their disadvantages – you have to remember to charge them up, and they can make the tool heavy. And I have an extension lead. So I decided not to send them back. But I do wonder what the wonderful tool is that has these two batteries and all the other good stuff.

I had some convenient silver birch logs that I thought I’d practise on, so I oiled the machine, pinged the chain a bit to see if it was set correctly (no idea, but the chaps in the factory probably put it on right), turned them on, waited a bit to make sure the chain was running at full speed as per instructions, and then clamped its jaws around a log. I liked the way that it wasn’t very noisy, not like a tree surgeon’s chainsaw. And it sliced through the log in no time. I mean, it was probably about two seconds maximum. But what I didn’t like was that the log jumped about at the start, and it wasn’t a clean cut.

Mess left by alligator loppers

If I had been pruning a tree that I wanted to keep alive, I would have had to get an ordinary saw out to make another, smoother cut. I am not sure whether this jumping effect was because the log wasn’t attached to anything. Maybe if I cut off a branch that was still attached to a tree it wouldn’t move. Reassuringly, the tool didn’t jump around – it is light, and the handgrips are easy to grip firmly. I don’t know whether there is something I am doing wrong, or whether this tool just doesn’t cut cleanly. And also the instructions say you are not allowed to go up a ladder and use the loppers. I wish I knew whether this is proper health and safety advice, like don’t try to take the chain off when the tool is plugged in, or bogus health and safety advice, like the label on our bottle of surgical spirit at work which warns that it could be harmful if you get any on your skin, despite the fact that one of the intended uses of the stuff is to dab it on your skin to harden it.