Helen's Garden Renovation Project

It’s about two months since I last made any proper attempt to do some gardening, so I haven’t written anything in my blog either. I am not dead. Neither, I am pleased to say, are most of my plants. I have doubts about my jasmine (officinalis, not nudiflorum) which is looking very shrivelled, and my osteospermums in pots may have carked it too. However, my big clump of osteospermum in the front garden has probably made it through, and the stuff in pots was only offshoots of the big clump. The pelargoniums are dead, but then they are meant to be.

The sun came out this morning, and I raked the leaves off the front lawn. I also walked round the back garden and tried to remember what I was doing. I picked up some bits of dead wood and pulled out some bittercress. And then the men building the extension of the house that backs onto mine came back from wherever they had gone to, and started shouting and playing their radio, and I went indoors again. One step at a time.

Wisdom has it that we are having the longest cold snap in Britain (1) for 15 years (2) since 1963 and (3) since 1947. I don’t remember 1995 being particularly snowy, but maybe it was Scotland that was cold, and dragged down the average for the rest of us. Or maybe it was exceptionally cold in March, but not in January. I am pleased to say that I don’t remember 1963 or 1947 at all.

The big event was Tuesday night (5th January 2010). The Met Office forecast was bang on – it started snowing heavily at six o’clock. The next morning I stuck my ruler into the snow on my drive, and the depth was 21.5 cm. We didn’t get much more snow after that, but because it has been so cold, the snow has taken a long time to disappear.

On the morning following the snowfall, I brushed the snow off the greenhouse roof – that’s the second time I’ve had to do that – and also went and beat up all my conifers to get most of the snow off their branches. It was good to see my little baby thuja stand up again once they were free from the weight.

I’m worried that I am going to lose some of my plants. Although they are all very hardy, plants in pots can die because all the soil freezes solid. But there is nothing I can do about this now. And at least none of the plants is a rare variety – they are all easily replaceable. The only one I had trouble obtaining is the Waldsteinia, and I have given bits of that to two other people, and have planted some in a sheltered spot, so I am confident that I can get some back if I need to.

The rose that did a flower bud (still just about visible on the right) must have had a big shock to find one of its stems completely encased in ice:

Rose stem encased in ice

And I do think the Pieris looks beautiful with its temporary appendages.

Pieris with icicles

Progress on the garden has stopped now. After the rain, and the cold, and the snow, I have decided it is a good time to do all the indoor things that I have been neglecting for the sake of the garden, and wait until the temperature is warm enough to go out without my hands going numb inside my fur-lined gardening gloves. In the meantime, here are some cheering pictures.

Christmas Rose

Cornus and snow

I think I remember a fairy story I read many years ago about someone who had to find some impossible things, and I am sure that one of them was ‘blackberries in February’. Well, perhaps I can help out with that. These photographs were taken this morning, and so with current light levels, February doesn’t seem that unreasonable.

This blackberry plant flowered in September and the fruit is ripening well.

Blackberries close up

My own progress has been slow, however. Now I have not only rain, but Christmas to contend with. I have had to take time away from the garden to do boring things like buying Christmas cards, but it cannot be helped. So I am cancelling the January milestone, and I am going to stop getting stressed about it and just laugh at my garden’s lack of biological competence. It’s not just the blackberry. The rose and the osteospermum have buds. And when I was clearing away some wet leaves, a large frog jumped out. I think I am going to have to sing lullabies to the amphibians this year if there is to be any chance of them hibernating.

Last month was the wettest November since 1914. It was also a frost-free November. Our first frost of the winter happened overnight on 30 November to 1 December, and it was something of a shock. My remaining tomato plant finally died, but some of the pelargoniums took no notice of the frost and decided to carry on anyway.

So there hasn’t been much progress. I put in a good session this morning because it wasn’t raining. It was cold, though. Even at midday there was still frost on the grass and bits of ice around. I dug up the nearer of the two euonymuses at one of the corners of the new lawn. I decided that it had to be moved because it was planted at the wrong level and therefore might have interfered with the construction of the lawn edge. Although digging up evergreens in the winter is not normally a great idea, I think the plant was grateful because it was sitting in such a waterlogged area. It was hard to dig it up because the soil I removed kept being replaced with water. At one stage I thought I would lose one of my wellies, but fortunately I was able to pull it out of the quagmire. I trimmed the plant’s roots and branches back a lot and stuffed it in a pot. I also broke up some path that was going to get in the way of the new lawn. I saw the steam come off the paving as I bashed it with the pickaxe.

I am not sure whether I will be ready to go ahead with the next stage of the building works in January. If more rain is on the way, as looks likely, I may have to delay the project. There is nothing I can do about this. I have worked very hard on the project in the dry days of September and October, and have neglected other things to spend time in the garden. Also, I have been looking up the cost of materials, and the work could be more expensive than I can afford at the moment, so that’s another reason to delay it.

I think the Met Office has been doing what my colleague at work, Susie, refers to as “managing expectations”. Yesterday morning it was predicting sunshine and heavy showers, with the emphasis on the heavy showers, but actually we got just the sunshine. This morning was a bit soggy, but I couldn’t afford to miss a session, so I went out and got cold and wet, but I did make progress.

Overview of garden with two sides of new lawn marked out

I have finished breaking up the path foundations, and have started putting out the poles and string to mark out where the lawn should go, according to my plan on squared paper. The lawn is to run diagonally across the garden to try and make it look longer. It doesn’t look as if I need to dig up the apple tree yet after all, but I may still yet move the lawn boundaries. It also looks as if the yellow euonymus can stay where it is for the time being. This is all good news because I am running out of time. As you can see very clearly, the recent winds have been very unkind to next door’s fence, and I was worried that the fence might fall on the apple tree and squash it. I stuck a brown piece of wood from the raspberry frame in the ground between the apple tree and the fence in the hope that it would take the brunt of any collision, but now that one panel has almost parted company with the post, the wind can get through the gap and I am hoping there will be no further damage.

Marking out large areas with poles and string is no joke, partly because my string is quite feeble – thin and stretchy – and my poles are about 15 years old and sometimes break into several pieces when I try to stuff them in the ground. On the picture I have drawn a line in pale grey to show where the string is because you wouldn’t be able to see the original string very well at the resolution I am using. I have been using a large metal right-angled triangle with 45 degree angles to position the string but even so I don’t think I have been very accurate. However, I have probably been accurate enough to work out what I want to do. I haven’t marked off the far long edge of the lawn because there were too many things in the way, like compost bags and sections of path foundations. I now know that I can move a lot of stuff to the area to the right of and in front of the big conifer in the corner because no building work will need to be carried out there. The “stuff” consists of sections of path foundation, and the plants in containers. I need to get as many plants off the patio as possible because there will be some cutting work carried out there. So I will level out the ground near the conifer, put the path foundations on the ground, and then put the plants on the path foundations. It looks as if I should be able to have the lawn completely flat, which I think will look better than a sloping lawn, and then have some rocks and nice rooty plants to support a rise in ground height right at the end of the garden.

And now I can spend the rest of the day being warm and dry, and do some armchair gardening, which involves thinking about which plants I would like to have at the left-hand side of the garden.

We have had very heavy rain recently, and this has slightly held up progress. The garden is very muddy, despite my well-drained sandy soil. I have missed a few sessions because the rain was too torrential. However, this morning a little light rain was quite welcome for cooling purposes as I wielded the pickaxe yet again.

The path foundations, mostly broken up into small pieces

Progress was quite slow at first, but now I have worked out a good technique. The thing to do is to gently bash a groove across the path where I want it to break. When this has been established, give it a few good whacks in various places along the groove until a crack appears. At this point, even if the crack is very narrow, it is possible to lever up the lump of concrete and it will snap off at the groove. Even so, I can’t do too much in one session because I get tired and then there is the risk of injury either to myself or to bits of the garden that I don’t want bashed up. The concrete is heavy too. I can just about carry the sections shown in my photograph, but I find it’s better to roll them end over end across the long-suffering lawn so that my back lasts as long as possible. This is very calorie-intensive work, so it is important to keep replenishing the fuel supplies by eating lots of cake.

I am aware that time is moving on fast. If I really am going to get these works carried out in January, I need to do even more. In time-honoured fashion, here is another one of my lists of things I probably won’t manage to do.

(1) Finish removing foundations of path to the right of where the raspberry frame was.
(2) Map out with poles and string where the pond and lawn will go.
(3) Look at poles and string and dither a bit while trying to decide whether this is what I really want. Move poles and string about and probably go back to original configuration.
(4) Dig up euonymus (the yellow stuff to the right of the black plastic in the overview picture below) and apple tree (at the left of the overview picture, still with leaves on) if they are in the way.
(5) Remove any other paths that are in the way.
(6) Decide which materials to use to build pond (see Kebur at http://www.kebur.co.uk/).
(7) Get quotes from work.

Garden overview

We have been very lucky with the weather so far, and I have now finished demolishing the raspberry frame. I sawed the posts into three sections and took them over to the right hand side of the garden. I also moved the footings to join the rest of the rubble next to the temporary pond. I have started taking up the foundations of the path to the right of the raspberry frame but this is quite hard work. I will have to break it into sections by creating a score line with my pickaxe and then levering it up so that it breaks along the score line. The foundations are quite hard so this will not be a fast process.

The raspberry frame is no more

I am now working on a more accurate version of the plan for the diagonal lawn and pond. I want to lawn to run at exactly 45 degrees to the house, so I have worked out some exact coordinates and plotted them on a spreadsheet, which allows me to create a new scale drawing. The next thing I need to do is to mark out where the lawn will go with poles and string, and spend a long time looking at it to see if I like it. I also need to do this to find out whether I have to remove any more plants or hard landscaping. I may need to dig up the euonymus at the end of the garden, and even one of the apple trees (the furthest one from the house).

The forecast for the next few days is rain, severe gales, and more rain. So the garden will just have to wait until we get some drier weather.

I am sad to report that in this year’s sample of eight very badly taken pelargonium cuttings, two didn’t make it, and this may turn into three failures. Fortunately we have still not had a frost, so I took some more cuttings, still very badly.

There are now less than two months to go before I must get quotations for the pond building and lawn edge laying. Unlike last year, I have been very busy with tuition, and haven’t had much time for the garden. I am still in the process of demolishing the raspberry frame. This job is going well.

The demolition of the raspberry frame. Only two posts out of six are still standing.

I have dug up four of the posts, and they were all very easy to remove. I have sawn the posts into approximately two-foot (60 cm) lengths so that I can dispose of the wood later. I tried to bash the concrete footings with a pickaxe, but haven’t made much headway. I was hoping that the concrete wouldn’t be very good and would break up easily, but no such luck. I have to hand it to my dad – he is an expert concrete maker. I think the fact that he made my mum wash all the rubble before we put it in the holes helped the bonding too. Fortunately the concrete-clad sawn-off posts are not too heavy to lift. I will use the sack trolley to transport them to the other side of the garden, out of the way, and perhaps they can be used for rubble when building the pond.

I have been encountering a new threat to the garden development project – foxes. They are moving my ground covering sheets and digging holes. However, there is a distinct reduction in cat mess, so maybe they are keeping the cats away. The foxes could be a big problem because of their ability to dig fairly large holes. I don’t want my new shrubs dug up and I don’t want craters in my lawn. On the other hand, if I could somehow persuade them to dig in certain areas only, they could help create the new pond.

I have finished the staining of the wooden shelving in the greenhouse and have screwed the shelves back in place. It was very difficult to get them back in. I had taken the precaution of photographing the shelves in their original positions so I knew which shelf went where (by comparing the positions of the knots in the wood), but it still required considerable brute force to push them into place. I tried to put the screws back into their original holes but this was difficult too. This is what the end result looks like, and I think it was probably worth it.

The greenhouse staging, stained in Sadolin teak woodstain

It is definitely autumn now, and that means loads of mushrooms. The following specimen is growing in abundance in one of our communal landscaped areas.

Fungus growing in communal area under lime tree

I am hoping that it is not honey fungus. I looked up honey fungus on the Internet and it is supposed to be apparent under the bark of the tree, which it isn’t. So maybe it is just some pretty brown stuff.

My tomatoes are still going happily and not suffering from blight, thanks to my copper fungicide. I am also pleased to report that my blackberry, which flowered wrongly last month, is now wrongly sporting a cluster of green fruits.

Unblighted tomato plant

Now that I have finished staining the staging, I can do some fun stuff, like demolishing the raspberry frame. This edifice was put up in June 1996 by a working party led by my dad. Since he had to mix the concrete by hand, we were economical with it, and dug nice neat holes with plenty of rubble in them. As a result, I found that after digging to a depth of about six inches around one of the posts, I could easily push it over. Indeed, a six-foot man could probably push the posts over without needing to dig any of the soil out first. However, this is not a disparaging comment on its construction (my parents never read this blog, but someone else might read it and tell them), since the frame has stood firm in many bouts of strong winds for more than thirteen years. I am just glad that this is going to be an easy job.

The remains of the raspberry frame after the start of demolition