Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Look, no more path. All gone.

Not only have I removed all the foundations, but I have broken them up into easily liftable chunks and piled them up neatly out of the way.

The reasons for my success are (1) much of the path foundation was much softer than the part I was trying to break up at first and (2) I changed my strategy after reading about how to break up concrete on the Internet. My old strategy was to chip out a line across the block and keep going until it cracked along that line. This produced nice neat cuboid-shaped blocks, but was very slow when tackling hard foundation. I found that if I bashed the edge (the edge furthest from the fence, obviously) then often the foundation would crack after only a few blows. This did not usually produce nice shaped blocks, but I didn’t care by then. When it came to breaking up the large chunks into smaller ones, I piled the blocks on top of each other, about three high. This made it easier to bash them with the pickaxe, and also meant that the vibrations couldn’t be absorbed by the soft, uniform soil. Sometimes, I managed to break up the blocks underneath the one I was trying to break, which obviously saved effort.

I now need to fill the space left by the path with soil from elsewhere, and I can plant things in the little rectangle at the left hand side of the patio. I will do that next week, weather permitting.

It rained on Wednesday night, for a change, and on Thursday morning it seemed a good time to turf the hole left by the reshaping of the patio.

I dug up some strips of turf from another area of the garden and turfed the space very badly. It does not need to be done well because in spring 2012 (plus slippage) I will dig up the turf and reseed the lawn. I just want it to be mowable until then.

With all the work I am doing, it is easy to forget to look at the plants, some of which are putting on a really good display.

In the temporary pond, the iris has been flowering for a week or two now.

And if I had known how beautiful the kalmia was, I would have got one a long time ago. Its flowers look like iced gems (without the biscuit).

The weather has stayed dry, although there was a tiny bit of rain overnight, and a slight sprinkling this morning. I have carried on taking up the path. I had a very unproductive session on Monday – the toilet cleaner didn’t seem to have done any good at all. I didn’t even manage to take up an eighth of the path before I became too tired to carry on.

So this morning I thought I would carve out a few grooves at the other end of the path and keep filling them with toilet cleaner in the hope that several applications might help weaken the concrete even if one application seemed to have no effect. And then I had some luck. The foundation at the far end of the path is much weaker than that at the near end. I managed to break up more than a quarter of the path in one session, which means I am now halfway through. In the picture below you can see which bits I have done because I have put small paving slabs against the fence where the foundation is missing. This is to deter foxes and badgers which might otherwise feel tempted to burrow underneath and possibly damage the fence panels.

I also did some planting. I planted my three pelargoniums among the baby thuja. This doesn’t count as pot removal because until a week ago I was keeping the pelargoniums indoors.

I planted some persicaria which I dug up from the communal shrubbery next to my house. The persicaria has done very well in that location and was getting overgrown, so needed thinning out. Honest. I checked the levels while I was at it – the spirit level in the picture is resting on the corner of the lawn edging. The ground slopes down to the back of the fence, so the conifers are lower than the soil level will be next to the lawn edging. I planted the persicaria at a height that was in between the height of the base of the fence and the height of the edging. It is the sort of plant that could help hold a slope together, so I am hoping that it likes its new location. That means three pots have gone.

I checked the levels at the left hand side of the garden too. Again, the ground slopes down towards the fence. I estimate there is a height difference of about 5 cm. This should not be too bad to deal with, but will need some thought when I lay the stepping stones.

Number of pots = 126. Percentage reduction so far = 13.1%

The promised rain didn’t really come to much, so I had a good week of gardening. It’s now the time of year when I need to spend a lot of time on maintenance, so progress has not been as fast as it is in early spring, but I have started work on dismantling the path. I have removed all the paving apart from one little triangle that is stuck fast to the foundation and refuses to come loose. (You can’t see the triangle in the picture because it is in the part of the path that has turned a corner).

And then I made a start on taking up the foundation. The mortar mix used to make the foundation has varied a lot among my different sections of path, and unfortunately, these foundations are very hard. The work is also made more difficult by the fact that the path is right against my neighbour’s fence, which means I have to be careful how I swing the pickaxe and also take care next to the fence posts. I have managed to remove only about an eighth of the foundation so far (the path turns a corner at the end, so there is more to do than is apparent from the picture). I tried drilling holes in the foundation using my power drill with hammer action, but that was very unsuccessful – after I had drilled a row of holes, the slab eventually cracked along a different line further up.

Then I wondered whether some acid might help to weaken the concrete – after all, it contains calcium compounds, which should like reacting with acid. I thought about pouring some vinegar on it, but then I decided toilet cleaner would be even better. The toilet cleaner is easily the most corrosive thing in my house – the limescale remover for the taps only has an X on it, but the toilet cleaner has a picture of drops burning a hole in someone’s hand. And it contains hydrochloric acid, and is thick and clingy so should stay on the concrete until it rains. So I made three lines of toilet cleaner. There was not much sign of a reaction – a mass of very small bubbles, but no audible fizzing. Perhaps it would be better to chisel out a groove and pour the toilet cleaner into that, then see if a crack develops if I bash it again after a day or so.

Still, I have done an eighth of the path, and I should be able to get through it eventually – it will just take time, like the Leylandii.

This is my latest arrangement of the tarpaulin on the pond. I am hoping that it will prove to be completely waterproof, but I need to wait for some rain to find out. The pond builder has been round to look at the pond, but has not told me his verdict yet. Blagdon has not replied to my email. It said it might take 14 days to respond unless my email referred to critically ill fish, but even if I get a reply today, this is still appallingly slow customer service. I can’t find any reviews of Blagdon Pond Paint on the Internet, which is unusual. It would be reassuring to hear that someone has managed to successfully waterproof a pond without the paint coming off and making a black sludge.

I have been distracting myself from the Pond Disaster by thinking about my planting plan for the left hand side of the garden. There is just about room for the apple trees at the centre back of the garden as long as I allow the canopies of the trees to overlap with the lawn. I am planning to move the trees in November, although my dad says I can move them any time I like as long as I water them well. An important advantage of moving them in November is that they will be lighter, especially as I can prune them after I have eaten the apples. I think there will be room for the magnolia at the far left hand corner. I am quite excited at the thought of this, as I had thought that the magnolia would have to stay in its pot for ever. I also hope to put in the buddleia and escallonia next to the fence, and the pieris in the damp patch behind the pond (it will be damp because that’s where the overflow empties) and irises near the shallow pond. My three cornuses are supposed to go where the magnolia is going, but I can put them in the right hand side of the garden, next to the third pond. I don’t see why not.

It looks as if today is the last dry day we are going to get for some time, so I got rid of six more pots and planted a viola, two primulas and three campanula portenschliagiana under the camellia. I chiselled out some excess mortar so I could plant them close to the edging.

Planting was hard work because the camellia has a lot of roots. I don’t think I will attempt to plant anything closer to the centre of the camellia because it needs its roots. There is still some more space next to the fence, though. I may later need to move some of the plants to put in a path to the compost bins, but that will not be a problem. The main thing is to get the plants out of the pots and into the ground where they will need much less maintenance.

Taking up the path will be a good thing to do in the coming weeks because it can be done in light rain (in fact, is best done in light rain because it is such hard work) and it doesn’t matter if the ground is soggy. It’s a good thing, really, that I haven’t got the lower pond operational yet because some fragments of concrete and mortar are bound to land in it, and might poison the water. After taking up the path, I am not sure what I will do next. I really need to move the apple trees, but that cannot be done until November – six months away. If I can work out where I want to put things, I may be able to plant in between the trees.

Number of pots = 129. Percentage reduction so far = 11%

Today I finished the hedge. Good.

It didn’t take me long to slot in the final tree because I got better at planting large things with practice. Also today I dished out the vine weevil killer. I used to dose every plant, but that takes such a long time and is so expensive, so this time I planned to dose only the most valuable plants (i.e. the biggest ones, and ones that I only have one of) and the most vulnerable (i.e. the euonymus and the primulas). I then did as many plants as possible with what I had left over. I used two 750ml bottles instead of five, so that’s an improvement.

Also today I did a lot of tidying up. It’s easy to clear away the lime tree flowers and dead leaves while everything is as dry as dust, but when the rain comes, as one day it surely will, they will turn to sludge and it will be much less pleasant to dispose of them.

I think the next thing I need to do is to take up the rest of the path on the left hand side. It will be easier to do this before I plant things in that area, and also I will be able to see more clearly what space is available and therefore work out what to do with it.

Number of pots = 135. Percentage reduction so far = 6.9%

Today, with no rain likely until Saturday or even Sunday, I thought it was time to paint the pond. There were strong winds on Monday and I was getting fed up with the tarpaulin blowing around. It would be good to get the pond up and running. So I took off the tarpaulin and cleaned out the interior, but when I wiped it with a damp cloth, the cloth still came away black. I am not convinced that the new paint will adhere if the old is still coming away. Also I found that the concrete skin on the bottom of the pond has cracked all over, and in some places it’s quite bad. So I rang up my pond builder, who will take a look in the next few days, and I emailed Blagdon, the manufacturers of the pond paint, and I will see what people say.

I am really disappointed about the pond. I don’t mind waiting for it to dry out, because this is not a fast-moving project, but I am losing faith that it will ever be operational. Perhaps I will have to drill holes in the bottom and make it into a raised bed. Or perhaps I could put a large plastic bin in it and let that fill with clean water while the rest of the pond fills up with black sludge. Or, finally, I could sand off all the black paint and put a chemical in the pond that will react with the poisonous chemicals that leach out of concrete, thus making them harmless.

On the bright side, there was still no reason why I couldn’t get on with the rest of the project. I planted a skimmia, which would have meant the loss of one pot, except that I had to displace two pulmonaria to make room for the skimmia. I moved one pulmonaria further over to the gate, and put the other in a pot to give to my mum, who has pink pulmonaria and light blue pulmonaria, but does not have this variety, which has deep blue flowers. She seems perfectly happy with what she has, but I think she could do with one of these.

I have planted the skimmia in the side border of the front garden. It is in quite a dark place but skimmia are supposed to be happy with shade. The skimmia is a female. We have several males just over the road, so there should be plenty of berries.

I also planted the pyracantha. I have put it against the last fence panel of the right-hand boundary because the foxes made a hole in the fence panel. I have now got a new fence panel but I don’t want the foxes to make a hole in that one too. The fence panel has netting over it, which I will have to gradually roll up as the pyracantha grows.

I made a start on digging over the cut-out rectangle at the left of the patio. The area is currently occupied by lychnis and with the soil like dust it was hard pulling it out. This is what I started with:

Number of pots = 136. Percentage reduction so far = 6.2%.

Today I decided to plant my two baby thuja and the great big euonymus, thus completing the hedge apart from the gap I left last time, which I will fill later. This is what the fence looked like before I started digging:

Then I planted my two baby thuja, which was a walk in the park after planting the big ones. And then I planted my biggest euonymus. Getting it out of the pot was hard, mainly because the pot was even heavier than the plant. I had some reservations about planting the euonymus. I am concerned that there may not, really, be room for it there. And also, it didn’t look 100% healthy. It has white blotches on the leaves and I think it has had whitefly. But I think that it probably just doesn’t like being in a pot. So I gave it lots of fertiliser, and lots of water, and maybe next month I will spray it with something and see if it cheers up.

The new thuja are so small compared with the others. I hope they manage to hold their own. At least they will get enough light. I will have to make sure that I give them, and the euonymus, plenty of water.

Talking of water, the Met Office has changed its prediction for May. It’s now giving the dry weather to the north, and allocating the rain to the south. While I admit we need the rain, I was getting used to this new concept of being able to do some gardening whenever I felt like it. So I think the pond will probably stay unpainted, and I will go back to Plan A: plant as many things as possible.

I now have 137 pots. This is a reduction of 5.5%. Progress is happening.

Today I decided to go for it and plant the six thuja in the trench despite the fact that hot weather was forecast. As I learned last autumn, planting trees of that size is no joke. As last autumn, I got better at it as I went along, but it was still a very long job. In the process I lost my trowel. I think I may have buried it while planting. I am afraid it will just have to stay there because there is no way I am digging the plants up again to look for it. It was part of my comprehensive 21st birthday toolkit present from my parents, and has had a long and productive life. May it rust in peace.

The observant reader will notice that there is a gap in the hedge in the following picture. This is because I didn’t dig the trench quite wide enough. Rather than doing some more digging, I decided that I would plant five of the thuja and put the sixth one in later, as I was getting quite tired and I wanted to make sure I finished the job. In fact, I didn’t quite manage to fill the gaps with soil up to the required level, but this was not such a bad thing because I could then fill up the hollows with water and thus give the trees a really good soaking.

Leylandii leaves are well known for causing a rash on contact with exposed skin. I had been wondering whether thuja leaves are just as bad. After today’s session, I think I can say, “Not quite.” I have red mottling all up both arms, but it doesn’t itch or feel sore.

I now have 140 pots – a reduction of 3.4%. And there is a lot more space on my patio now.

It’s been such a lot of work, but just when I was thinking I would never finish removing the Leylandii roots, I suddenly did.

I am now ready to plant the six thuja in the trench. This is not something I expect to complete in one session, but you never know. I could give it a go tomorrow.

The warm, dry, sunny weather continues. I really cannot remember when it last rained. This is good in that I can take every opportunity I have to work in the garden, but bad in that I have to do such a lot of watering. I have counted my pots, not including the bulbs in the side passage which I am leaving to their own devices. I have 145 pots. My aim is to reduce this by 50% by the end of June.

The weather forecast is for more dry weather well into mid-May. This has caused me to think again about my pond plans. If May is hot and dry, then the advantage of planting in May rather than, say, June or July, is reduced. Perhaps I will paint the pond in May instead of July, even though this will mean less planting progress (because I will have less time to do the planting). After all, we may have a very rainy summer to follow this exceptionally dry spring. And it would be nice to get the tarpaulin off the pond and have some water and plants in it instead.

Today is the first anniversary of Dave’s death, and I came home from work an hour early and planted a rhododendron. It is the one that my neighbours Nick and Mel kindly gave me when they learned that he had died.

I had already prepared the site by digging a hole of the right size, and so it didn’t take me long to plant it.

And now it can get on with flowering. I think I need a stone frog ornament to put next to it, although I realise that not everyone would agree.

For love is eternal. And those we love shall be with us throughout all eternity.