Helen's Garden Renovation Project

The weather for September has been very dry, and I have taken advantage of it as much as the demands of work have allowed me. The main job has been to stain the greenhouse staging. It has had two coats of wood preserver and three coats of Sadolin Classic on each side, and it will get two coats of Sadolin extra to finish. This may seem a bit over the top, but I wanted a good deep colour and I know that it will be a good many years before I unscrew the staging and stain it again. Two of the shelves have to be stained in the greenhouse because they have power points attached to them, and when it rains, everything inside the greenhouse gets wet. I have not yet worked out why this is – if I stand in the greenhouse when it’s raining, I don’t get any drips landing on my head. It is a good thing I have invested in special outdoor versions of the power points and light switch. It is also a good thing that September has been mainly dry.

Here are two pictures of the garden as it is today:

Right hand corner of the garden taken from an upstairs window

Left hand corner of the garden taken from an upstairs window

You can see that I have moved the compost bins out of the way to the right hand side of the garden, which will not have any work done on it just yet. I have also taken up the surface of the path next to the raspberry frame. I need to remove the side of the raspberry frame furthest from the fence (the other side can stay for now) and take up the path foundations. I also need to start measuring up and put some markers down to show where the pond and new lawn are going to go. I have just over two months before I intend to get quotes for the work.

The cats are learning. Unfortunately they are not only learning to run like blazes as soon as they see me, but to scrape back the plastic coverings to reveal new toilet opportunities. I think I will have to abandon my makeshift attempts to cover the ground with assorted bits and pieces, and just buy some enormous great sheets of polythene from B&Q or Wickes.

We have been very lucky with the weather in September. Today I finished moving the compost from my Dalek-type bins to my square bins next to the greenhouse. The first compost bin I emptied was the middle one in terms of how long the compost had been in there. I didn’t find any larvae in it. The second bin that I emptied was the most recent to be filled, and it was full of larvae. The third bin that I emptied was the first to be filled, so had some lovely crumbly compost in it, and that was full of larvae too. I have come to the conclusion that the reason I didn’t find any larvae in the first bin I emptied was that the eggs hadn’t hatched then, or hadn’t been laid.

(Update: when I first wrote this post, I thought the larvae were vine weevil larvae. I now think they are cockchafer larvae (previously illustrated in April 2009), as they have small brown legs, and vine weevil larvae haven’t got any legs. Also I think they are a lot smaller).

Whatever sort of larvae they are, here is a set of six for you to look upon with revulsion:

Larvae found in compost heap

I would take a picture of my progress, except that it doesn’t look much different from before because I haven’t moved the empty round compost bins yet. They are useful to cover the earth as a cat deterrent.

The next job is to stain the greenhouse staging, now that the wood preservative I applied must have dried by now. I would much rather break up the path, but the weather is right for staining (not too hot, not too cold) and I had better get on with it.

I can’t remember an autumn that involved quite as many beech nuts in my garden as this one. Perhaps I am noticing them more because quite a lot of them land on my greenhouse roof, but I am sure I have never had quite this many on my lawn before. The nuts come from the beech tree next door. They are being very inefficiently eaten by pigeons. Possibly squirrels are having a go too, but I haven’t seen any so far.

This is a good time for Renovation because (1) I am working fewer hours at Health Promotion because it’s term-time (2) I have some pupils, but the numbers haven’t built up yet to frantic levels (3) the temperature is ideal for heavy work.

I have now moved the contents of two out of my three round compost bins. The first bin was the first one that I filled, so the compost was quite well done. I sieved it and used anything that went through the sieve for repotting members of my Portable Herbaceous Border. I put the lumps in one of my square compost bins by the greenhouse. The second bin was the last one to be filled, so most of the compost wasn’t done yet. It had a lot of waterlily in it from when I emptied the old pond. It also had about ten nasty little vine weevil grubs in it. Since the birds are so busy eating the beech nuts, I decided not to leave the grubs out on the path in the hope that something will eat them. I mean, would you eat vine weevil larvae if there were a zillion beech nuts all over the place to eat instead? So I chopped them in two with my trowel instead. I didn’t find any vine weevil grubs in the first compost bin. Maybe they preferred the sliminess of the not-yet-very-rotted compost.

I need to get some pyracantha with lots of health and safety warnings to plant near my square compost bins to deter burglars. It’s so easy to jump on a bin and get over the fence, and I don’t want anyone doing that. If I can get a variety that is willing to be trained on top of the fence it will deter cats too.

The Sungold tomatoes are still producing, at the rate of one or two tomatoes per plant every day. They have not got blight yet. I love copper fungicide (but I always wash it off before eating the tomatoes).

I am taking this week off work and once again I chose the right week! Well, it has been a little drizzly sometimes, but generally the weather has been ideal, and it looks good for the next few days too.

It is now cool enough to attempt to stain the staging of the greenhouse. I really wish I had done this before the greenhouse was installed, but I didn’t think of it. The staging is pretty awful. The wood is very poor quality and the edges have been rough sawn and are very splintery. I started sanding the five pieces of the staging, having first unscrewed them from the supports, and although I can’t say they are nice, they are a lot better than they were before. I have swept the floor of the greenhouse and dusted off the cobwebs with a soft brush, and tomorrow I will clean the staging with methylated spirit and then it will be time to apply some wood preservative before staining it.

I am continuing to monitor my plants for signs of confusion and incompetence. This blackberry ‘Black Satin’ seems to think now is a good time to do a flower.

Could this be a winter fruiting blackberry?

It’s in a pot, so I wonder whether if I put it in the greenhouse I would get blackberries in November.

Also worth a look is my little purple violet, which thinks it’s spring.

Lovely violet, wrong time of year

My sedums and London Pride are putting on a good display. They are neighbours in my border because the proper name for London Pride is Saxifraga x urbium, and therefore they both begin with S.

Sedum flowering correctly. Not sure about the London Pride.

Apart from the greenhouse staining, my most urgent job is to split up and repot some of my perennials, especially the Waldsteinia. In fact, I may plant some of the Waldsteinia in a little strip by the fence. I’m also thinking of putting some ground cover among the thuja at the end of the garden, to deter the cats. As well as that, I am continuing to move the compost from the bins on the left to the bins on the right. This will be several hours’ further work, but there’s no urgency for that. Indeed, since it’s quite heavy work, it’s best to do it when the weather gets cooler.

I think it is the end of summer because I have now set my central heating to come on in the evenings. The end of summer is in some ways bad because it means the first frost is not long away, and it gets dark earlier, and the rain is colder… but this week I have for the first time felt that there might be some chance of getting on with some Renovation instead of purely weeding and mowing the lawn.

Some things I have done since my last entry:
(1) I sprayed the tomatoes (Sungold, my all time favourite variety) with copper fungicide because they are bound to get blighted otherwise. Now they are blue, and I have to wash the tomatoes before eating them if I don’t want to exceed my recommended copper intake, but this is a lot better than them being brown. I will spray them again tomorrow, and keep going until the first frosts. They are in pots, but I think the pots will be too heavy for me to move them into the greenhouse.

(2) I decimated the bay tree. Although I think that the bay tree is so lovely it should be as big as possible, I also realised that if I let it grow any bigger I wouldn’t be able to prune it myself safely any more, so I got on my biggest step ladder and pruned off the top bits.

The remaining nine-tenths of the bay tree after pruning

(3) I moved one of my logs from the Leylandii that I removed about a year ago and found two little baby newts, which I think must be from this year’s crop. I don’t know whether they are breeding in my temporary pond (see the foreground of the bay tree picture) or whether they are using someone else’s pond, but the main thing is that they obviously like visiting my garden.

Little baby newt sheltering under a Leylandii log

(4) I levelled the ground under the three compost bins next to the greenhouse so they can stand upright. I didn’t go as far as getting the bins all at the same height.

New compost bins

I now need to move the compost from the old bins to the new ones. I am planning to sieve the compost and dig into the ground any bits that fall through the sieve, because they’ve probably rotted enough, and move to the new compost bins the bits that don’t fall through the sieve, because they could do with being eaten by fruit flies and woodlice for a bit longer. I have pumped up the wheelbarrow tyre in preparation (suggested maximum pressure = 30 PSI. Actual pressure at time of checking = about 7 PSI).

Old compost bins. Contents to be rehomed to new compost bins.

(5) I had time to admire some of the planting we did for our residents’ communal areas in April 2008. The best section is the smallest bit just next to my house. It’s the best because it gets the most sun and also the most water, since I am the most conscientious waterer and my hosepipe won’t reach to any other areas. The purple-leaved job is a Cotinus ‘Grace’ and the big bright pink flowers are sedum spectabile ‘Brilliant’, which certainly is. The smaller-flowered plant at the front is Persicaria affine and at the back there are two Spirea ‘Goldflame’.

Border with Cotinus, Sedum, Spirea and Persicaria

All credit to my mum for thinking of the cotinus, and to Susie Bower for letting me have the cotinus and thinking of the other plants that look so good with it. (Sadly, after the picture was taken, a unknown creature stood on some of the sedums so it doesn’t look so good now).

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.

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 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.

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.