Helen's Garden Renovation Project

The heatwave carried on today, and so did I. I drilled holes in the bottoms of seven big square planters and repotted thuja in two of them. Well, it’s a start. I also continued to tidy up the Portable Herbaceous Border and it’s looking much better. I’ll take a photo when I’ve finished. In the meantime, here is a picture of the left hand edge of my garden. Between the fence and the path there is just enough soil for plants to get in. Usually it’s weeds, but right now there is a good sized colony of lychnis, which is a grey-leaved plant with bright magenta flowers. I will weed this edge by hand rather than use glyphosate, because a line of lychnis by the fence would be absolutely lovely.

The cats are still causing me problems. I think people should need planning permission to keep a cat. After all, if I decided to run a chip-making factory from my home, the Council would close me down if the neighbours didn’t like the smell. And the messes the cats leave behind smell far worse than chips. One or two cats would be all right (although I’d prefer none at all) but I think there are six or seven using my garden as a toilet at the moment. Once the density of cats exceeds, say, one cat per 1000 square metres, the Council should refuse permission for anyone in the area to acquire any more cats, or anyone to bring a cat when they move into the area.

I have used two supposed cat repellents: Get Off, which consists of green crystals with a soapy smell, and something else, which consists of small grey pellets which smell of garlic. I suppose that to test them properly I should set aside two areas of bare earth, apply a cat repellent to one patch and not the other, and count the number of little piles left in each area the next day. But I can’t be bothered to do that, and anyway my criteria for success are very stringent: no piles of any size at all, ever! It’s possible that the repellents may reduce the number of piles by half, for all I know, but that’s not good enough.

The only thing that has consistently worked for keeping the cats away is a physical barrier. For example, compost bags sewn together, or old pond liner, weighted down with rubble.

The cats then tend to foul just under the edge if they can peel it back, or on top of the barrier at the edge, but this is much less than if they had access to the whole area. I tried leaving marjoram trimmings in a bare area (see the front left of the picture), thinking that the smell might put the cats off, but no – they just pooed right next to it.

Around the thuja, I have also used a plastic barrier, but I have also added in a few prunings from my neighbours’ shrubs, some of which are spiny. (Yes, I know that the prunings legally belong to my neighbours, but I feel confident that they aren’t expecting me to give them back). I think that when I start planting the area, my best hope will be spiny shrub cuttings, as there will be only small areas of soil between the plants.

With the decrease in available toilet space, the cats now poo on my lawn, or on top of my stepping stones in between the compost bins. This is still annoying, but at least it is easy to clear up.

As an alternative to requiring planning permission to keep a cat, another way of stopping the nuisance is to require all cat owners to feed their cats gold pellets daily. This would encourage owners to try to get their cats to do their business in their litter trays, but if the cats still preferred to perform their functions elsewhere, at least the garden owners would get automatic compensation for the unpleasantness.

And finally… I have officially lost the Annual Willowherb Elimination Stakes once again. I found at least two willowherb plants with fluffy seed heads today. I will still keep going because the fewer seeds the better, but the trophy is once again with the willowherb. Maybe next year my luck will change.

The Met Office has arranged for us to have a heatwave this week. We may be getting some heavy showers on Friday, but in the meantime it is important to make sure that nothing collapses from heat exhaustion, including me.

Gardening in a heatwave is fine as long as you follow these simple rules:
(1) Go out as early in the morning as you can manage, and go indoors at eleven o’clock to have a nice cup of tea. Or, if you are unlucky enough not to have the week off work, go out in the evening, but you will have to wear insect repellent and put up with stinky barbecues.
(2) Don’t attempt to move much soil, or swing a pickaxe. Just do some nice gentle pruning, weeding and repotting.
(3) Wear a hat. You can even walk to the shops wearing a hat and no one will laugh at you.
(4) Drink plenty of water as you go along.
(5) Work very slowly. Remember that if it were raining, you wouldn’t be doing any work at all, so anything you can do is a bonus.

The willowherb competition is still wide open. The willowherb could win it by miles, or by kilometres, or by inches. There were some patches of soil which were so hard and dry that I decided to cheat by spraying the area with glyphosate to get rid of the weeds, but I did remove all the willowherb by hand first.

I am worried about the thuja that I planted last year. I started watering it a few weeks ago, and am wondering whether I should have started earlier. There are brown patches on the leaves. However, most of the leaves look healthy and the plants are evidently growing. I shall be giving them a good drenching three times a week while the heatwave lasts.

I fed all my potted plants today, apart from the lime-hating ones, which get a specialist slow-release feed made of pellets. I have used up all my Wilkinson’s Wondergro, so I decided to try some B&Q general purpose liquid plant food. The Wondergro is a crystalline solid, which takes time to dissolve. The liquid doesn’t need to dissolve. However, it is much easier to spill the liquid on the patio than it is to spill the solid. The biggest disadvantage of the liquid is its price. Presumably it is similar in quality to the solid. However, it costs about the same price for 180 litres of food solution as the solid does for 900 litres of food solution. I used more than half the bottle this morning (I have so very many leaves to feed) so I shall have to buy some more, and I think I’ll get some more of the solid next time. The plants are supposed to get fed every week, but considering that they didn’t get fed at all last summer, I think they will be happy enough with once a fortnight.

It is now coming up to the end of June, and this is when I enter the annual competition against the willowherb. The game is to pull it all up before it sets seed. The willowherb has its name inscribed on the trophy for every one of the past thirteen years. What makes me think this year will be any different? Two things: I’m not going away on holiday this summer, and this week, I’ve got a week off work!

The forecast is for a heatwave, gradually turning cooler by the end of the week. There could be thunderstorms and heavy showers, but generally the South should be fairly dry. So I am hoping that I will be able to manage two hours a day from today until Friday. If so, this is what I am going to do:

(1) Pull up every single willowherb plant.
(2) Pull up any other weeds that get in the way.
(3) Collect up all the random pots in my garden and arrange them in stacks according to size.
(4) Repot all parts of the Portable Herbaceous Border that need repotting, and pull out the weeds in the pots.
(5) Trim the marjoram (this is on the left hand side of the garden so you can’t see it in either of the photos in this post).
(6) Prune the apple trees. (OK, this is getting into the realms of fantasy now, so maybe I’d better stop here. It is, after all, a week I’ve got off work, not a year).

And anyway, the right hand side of the garden doesn’t look too bad:

It’s a bit green, but that’s hardly a bad thing in a garden.

I know it’s almost a month since my last entry, but that’s because the exams have been approaching. The second and last GCSE maths paper is tomorrow (that’s the linear course – the modular course isn’t over yet) and I said goodbye to five GCSE students last week. One of them gave me a gorgeous, utterly lovely lupin. I have never tried to grow a lupin yet, and so far I have to admit I haven’t done too well. I put it outside on Wednesday evening, and on Saturday morning it was hanging its head and leaves and looking thoroughly sorry for itself. So I put it in a saucer so it can have plenty of water, and this evening (Sunday) it is looking much better. I shall repot it into a bigger pot so it can have a better chance of surviving in the harsh environment of my Portable Herbaceous Border, which does not get watered every day, and never will. At least I realised that it was going to get eaten by slugs (I don’t know how I knew, but I did know) and sprinkled the pot liberally with slug pellets, so it hasn’t.

Since my last post I have taken delivery of 20 bags of organic compost from the excellent Compost Centre (http://www.thecompostcentre.co.uk/). I ordered them by telephone, and the bags arrived one day while I was at work, and I sent off a cheque. Much easier than making several car journeys to buy them from somewhere else. I don’t know whether I will need all 20 bags for this phase of the project, but if not, they will keep until the next phase.

This morning I had a blog-related shock. I noticed on Friday that my helenpercy.com POP and SMTP servers weren’t working, but I found I could still access my webmail, so I decided to wait a while and contact my hosting company, UKHost4u, if they didn’t start working again. This morning I tried to access my blog, and I got a parking page from some horrible little outfit that had taken over my domain name. I nearly passed out in horror. When I had collected myself enough, I checked that my renewal invoice had been paid, and then contacted UKHost4u to ask them what had happened. I also checked on WHOIS (http://domains.whois.com/domain.php?action=whois) and saw that the domain registration had expired on Thursday – three days ago.

Fortunately this all had a happy ending. I had thought that if someone forgets to renew their domain name and some vulture jumps in and takes it, then the person has lost it. But actually it says on the Internet in various places that there is a thirty-day grace period on .com domains before anyone else is allowed to take over the domain. And when I contacted UKHost4u, they replied almost immediately, saying that the billing system hadn’t renewed the domain and they would do it now, and the website would be back online within 24 hours. The website was back within twenty minutes, and the WHOIS entry was updated too.

Despite the deleterious effect on my blood pressure, I would still recommend UKHost4u as a hosting service because I believe that the measure of any organisation or service is not whether it makes mistakes (subject to reasonable limits), but how well it deals with those mistakes.

Moving from the virtual world back to the real one, my two main gardening problems at the moment are weeds and cats. Of these, I think the cats are troubling me more. I am well used to weeds, and at least they grow in a predictable manner and don’t smell.

The cats, on the other hand, are out of control. I think they must be fighting to own the territory of my garden, and unfortunately they don’t do this simply by biffing each other or chasing each other away, but by trying to turn it into the locality’s biggest toilet. The most effective way of preventing them from doing this is to cover any bare patches of soil with polythene, weighted down round the edges with bits of rubble. Earlier this week I cut up four compost bags and sewed them together with my grandmother’s terylene thread. Artificial fibres are less likely to rot than cotton, and also it’s easier to sew with them because they don’t tangle as easily. I will do this with all my compost bags as I use the contents. As I gradually cover over more and more of the garden, the cats are getting desperate. This morning I saw that they had used the small patches of earth between my stepping stones near the compost bins as their latest latrine. And they had used it very, very thoroughly. It must have been the joint efforts of several cats.

The problem may ease if one cat becomes dominant and the others keep out of my garden. However, I don’t know if this is going to happen any time soon. I am going to be in trouble when I get the lawn made and when I plant my shrubs behind it if I don’t find some way of stopping the cats from performing their biological functions. For the shrubs, I may have to use a membrane, like they do in gardening makeover programmes. For the lawn, I can keep the area wet – I’ll sow the seed in April, before it gets very hot – and possibly use cat repellent, although I have not much confidence it works. Netting is also a possibility, although I’ll need a lot. Perhaps I may have to dig a patch elsewhere in the garden as a sacrifice – if the cats can use that, they may keep off the areas I am working on.

But for now my priorities are to keep the Portable Herbaceous Border alive – that means repotting some of the plants – and carrying on with the renovation work while keeping the weeds down and clearing up after the cats.

I can report that the greenhouse is now wired up to the mains. An electrician who is a friend of one of my engineering students did it a week ago. If anyone else has a Fawt Nova Octagonal Greenhouse and is wondering how to wire it up, have a look at my photograph.

You can see that the armoured cable comes in through the floor (it would be better if it had been put nearer the wall when the base was laid but never mind) and goes into a control box. The control box has one circuit for lighting and one for the plug points. It also has a RCD. I have a RCD set to the same sensitivity in the main consumer unit, so if there was a fault, either of them could trip. One of the three cables coming out of the control box goes up to the power point directly above it. The power point is an outdoor use one because I could easily get water on it when working there and I don’t want to keep tripping the RCD (or even worse, finding out that the RCD on this particular occasion doesn’t work!) The power point rests on a small piece of wood so that the cover can close. The cable coming out of the left of the control box goes to a second double power socket. Having four power points is useful because I may want to plug in a few propagators as well as a heater. The cable to the right goes to the light switch. The light switch is just above the door frame. It was quite hard to find a place big enough to attach it so, but I can easily reach the switch here and I think it works well.

The lightbulb is attached to a holder in the centre of the roof.

Here is a picture of the whole thing (apart from the roof).

It was not an easy job to do the wiring. My electrician took about six hours, including wiring the other end of the cable to the consumer unit in the garage. He has put an isolator switch in the garage so when I’m on holiday I can switch the electricity off, in case a burglar comes into my garden and plugs lots of really powerful appliances into the greenhouse sockets, thus running up a huge electricity bill. I thought it was worth writing about this job in some detail because I think other people might want to know how to wire up a greenhouse like this one and have it still looking nice afterwards.

Yesterday I managed to dig up and remove the tree stump, at last. I am very pleased. I did it by cutting through all the side roots and digging out the soil from under the stump with a trowel. It was then possible to push the stump over, and any remaining roots were so rotten that they just broke under the force of gravity. I am now much better at chopping through wood with a mattock. It feels quite easy, but I can tell it’s hard work because I seem to need a lot of oxygen to do it. After I had pushed the tree stump over, I sat down for a breather and took this photograph. You can’t see the tape measure markings, but at least the width of the tape gives a sense of scale.

I then had to get the tree stump out of the hole. The weight of it is right on the limit of what I can lift, so I couldn’t just lift it out of the hole. Fortunately, since the hole was quite big, it was quite easy to get the stump out. I rolled the stump to one side, and then added some soil to the other side of the hole. I rolled the stump slightly uphill to the other side, and then added some soil to the side of the hole that had just been vacated. I carried on doing this until the stump was near enough to the surface around the hole for me to roll it out. I rolled it over to the other side of the garden and put it next to the bay tree, out of the way. I could carry on smashing it up with the mattock, but I think I will put some stuff on it that accelerates the rotting of tree stumps, and then try to pick it up in a year’s time, and see if it falls apart in my hands.

While removing the stump, I found a new complication. Some bees have made a nest in my excavations. When I finish filling in the hole, it will block their nest, which they will not be very pleased about. Killing bees is a bad thing to do, but delaying projects is also bad. I tried to get them to pose for a photograph, but as you would expect of bees, they were very busy. This was the best I could do.

I then went indoors and looked the bees up on the Internet. They are most likely to be miner bees, which can’t sting people because their stings don’t penetrate the skin. And best of all, they will buzz off some time towards the end of May. If I block up their nest, then their babies might have difficulty getting out, but perhaps I can move the babies, if I can find them. So I am going to carry on working and try to avoid the nest for now.

In my last post I said that it was difficult to find time to renovate the garden because the demand for tuition was building up. This is still true, but the garden has now decided that it’s time for Spring and is slowing my progress by producing weeds, especially dandelions and bittercress, and by growing (the grass is the main culprit here). All these things need attention, and that reduces the time available I have for the Garden Renovation Project. I have had to repot the Very Badly Taken pelargonium cuttings because they can’t go outside until the end of May. I have also decided to sow some tomatoes this year. My parents gave me some very large pots and I will put the tomatoes in them, which will reduce the need for weeding, and I’ll probably be able to get away with only watering them every two days, unless it is very hot, because the pots are so large.

In case anyone thought that the reason I haven’t mentioned the magnolia which I dug up and stuck in a pot is that it has died, it hasn’t. It hasn’t produced as many flowers as last year, but it’s made a jolly good effort and here it is.

So, although I was out for two hours this morning, I didn’t make much progress with the tree stump. After the recent hot weather, it seems to have dried out a bit around the edges, so I sawed off a few slices. I am trying to dig it out but that’s quite a lot of work as well. I think that if I can dispose of it by the end of May, I will be doing well.

Progress has slowed down now. This is partly because the run of good weather has stopped, and partly because I am now at the peak time for the tutoring business. Business has been quiet since September, probably because of the recession, but now there is a sudden increase in demand and I have to do my best to meet it until it all goes quiet again on 1st June (this is the date of the second GCSE maths paper). In an attempt to make up for the lack of demand for tuition in January, I have been working extra hours at the day job, and this also takes time away from the garden.

I have removed a good quantity of rubble, mainly breezeblocks, from the old pond area. I have also found a tree stump, which was under the pond shelf. I could leave the stump there, as it will be a few inches below the soil surface and I could work around it when it comes to planting the area, but I would rather do a proper job and get rid of it. The stump is well-rotted and has a black coal-like coating, as would be expected after twelve and a half years of it being squashed under a weight of water. However, it’s still quite a task to remove it. I started sawing bits off, but it was very hard to do this because the wood was soft and full of yukky rotten tree sap.

So I bought a mattock. It’s called a “grubbing mattock” and it looks like a pickaxe, except the blades are flat and wide instead of being pointy. Then I started bashing the tree stump. This was not a fast process either, partly because the tree stump is quite big, and probably partly because I am probably not very good at this (although I can say that I was pretty good at breaking up the path foundations with the pickaxe). Progress can be measured by the full blue box of tree stump splinters at the top of the photograph.

I have a few other things to report. While I was digging out the rubble a week or two ago, I found two grubs which looked like this.

At first I thought it was a horrible vine weevil maggot, but I realised it was far too big, and also it had legs, which I don’t think vine weevil maggots do. I decided it probably wasn’t anything I wanted, so I left it on the path for a bird to eat. Then I looked it up on the internet and found it was probably a chafer grub. These creatures are bad for lawns, but I don’t think getting eaten by chafer grubs is the worst problem my lawn is facing at the moment, so I am not worried. (My main lawn problem is too much moss, but I am not going to do anything about that because I am going to dig the whole thing up and start again with seed).

I am very pleased with the cherry tree in my front garden this year. I like to think that the improvement is due to my hard work two years ago, when I dug out a few hundredweight of rubble from under its roots. It’s just as likely that it has benefitted from two wet summers. Anyway, this is a vast improvement on this time two years ago.

I have spent two sessions since the last post breaking up the path in front of the pond, removing the underlay for the pond liner and breaking up the edge of the pond. I managed to remove all the paving slabs quite easily, but most of the foundation of the pond was solid concrete, which I broke up with a pickaxe. This was quite easy, really. It is absolutely essential to wear eye protection for this job. It is also highly advisable to keep your mouth shut, however much the exertion may make you want to breathe through your mouth. I used the pickaxe to make a line of indentations at right angles to the path edge and eventually a section would break off. It is important to work out how much you can lift, and break the concrete up into sections that are not too heavy.

I pulled away the remaining underlay and put it on top of various earth piles, where it will provide the useful function of deterring cats who want to increase the organic content of my soil. I also dug a little deeper right at the bottom of the hole so I could bury a very heavy kerbstone that I dug up from the shrub patch next to my house when the Residents planted things last April. The kerbstone was too heavy for me to lift safely so I didn’t want to try and take it to the dump.

I have started to remove one of the tree stumps that was left in place when the pond was dug. It has flaked off into small pieces, which I am putting in my compost heap. I think there are more tree stumps in the area. There is also a great deal of rubble, and the soil directly under the path is poor quality subsoil, not topsoil as I had hoped. I think I am going to end up with too much subsoil and not enough topsoil. As I have no intention of paying to have the subsoil taken away and replaced with topsoil, I am going to have to convert the subsoil to topsoil. I am not sure whether this is actually possible, but I found an article here that said it was: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/shade_gardening/714. I think I just have to remove the rubble and any large stones and add some compost or soil improver. I am not going to add any sand because my subsoil is sandy enough.

I am seriously considering whether to keep my temporary pond. Over the past few days I have enjoyed the activity that I can see from my kitchen window while doing the washing up. A thrush has been pulling out bits of plant, presumably to make a nest with. Maybe I will put in a small moulded pond where the temporary pond is now, when the real pond has been dug.

I rang up the greenhouse installer and told him the window wouldn’t fasten shut, and he said I should give it a shake and then try again. So I gave it a shake, and it was a little nearer to being fastenable, and then another shake, and then a few more, and then I could fasten it. I’m not convinced the fasteners are really in the right place, but there don’t seem to be any gaps when the window is closed, which is the important thing.

It is possible that the newts that I transferred from the old pond to my plastic buckets may have died because the water got too cold overnight. There was a smaller volume of water in the buckets than in the pond, so it would have got colder more quickly. Although the newts could get out, they may not have realised in time that they were getting too cold. It was a shame that they died, but I have found plenty more around the old pond, so the population is not in danger.

Today the men came to erect the greenhouse.

They did it very quickly and I think it looks as beautiful as I had hoped. They gave me some top tips for being nice to greenhouses: (1) if you leave the door open, make sure you fasten it open with the metal stay because if it bangs it will break the glass and distort the frame; (2) if it snows, get the snow off the roof.

I would add a third Top Tip for greenhouse installation: the installers may leave the door and window open to allow the smell of mastic to dissipate. Before the installers leave, try closing the door and window. I did not do this, and I have found that the window will close, but the stay is misaligned, which means that only one of the prongs fits into a hole. I’m not sure this matters because the window is quite tightly closed, but I should have checked. The door closes, but only just. I will try applying some Free and Easy from Lakeland, which has worked wonders on my sliding bookcase doors.

Anyway, it is done now, and I just need some electricity and then I can start playing with the greenhouse.

I gave my plants their first dose of Wilkinson’s plant food. I also gave all the acid-loving plants some granules. Then I took up some more of the path by the original pond and put it around the temporary pond to make a sort-of decorative border. I also pulled out some of the underlining and put it next to the temporary pond. I am going to use these areas to deposit rubble when I destroy the paths and the original pond.

I found some more sleeping newts under the under-lining.

I peeled away enough of the under-lining to see what had caused the pond to sink. I found that great gaping holes had appeared above the disused soakaway. I will have to excavate properly and fill them in, so it is a good thing that I have too much subsoil. Also I am a bit worried about the foundations of the path that runs in front of the pond. I think they might be a bit solid, which means I may have trouble removing them. However, I do have a pickaxe. And the tree stump, which Lotus Landscapes left under the path twelve years ago because it was too heavy to remove, is not going to give me a lot of trouble. I bashed it lightly with a spade and it started flaking away. Unfortunately I haven’t left it there long enough for it to turn into coal, but I can put the rotted remains into my compost heap.