Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Both the weather and my back have behaved well, and here is the result:

Back lawn nearly finished

I estimate that I can finish the job in two more sessions if the remaining section contains very little rubble. I hit a bad patch of rubble last week, but in my last two sessions there has been almost nothing to get rid of.

I’m quite surprised I managed to make this much progress. At the start, I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to finish the job by mid-September, but I have found that if I do no more than 60 to 90 minutes of digging a day, my back doesn’t mind too much. And with the continued dry weather, the soil has become drier and thus a lighter weight to shift. I have no more turf from the old back lawn to bury in the trenches, but I have been digging up turf from the front lawn to reveal a large cherry tree root which I want to dig out this autumn.

The lawn was going to be the last thing that I did because of needing to estimate how much more soil I would need. However, I changed my mind because September is a very good time to sow seed, and there’s still a chance that I might be ready to do the sowing this month if (1) the weather is favourable and (2) my back doesn’t give up.

So I ordered 20 bags of compost from The Compost Centre and started digging. You can see where I have got to by the change in colour of the soil. It seemed like quite a daunting task at first because it’s so tiring that I don’t let myself do more than 1.5 hours in a session. I have mixed in 11 bags of subsoil from digging out the octagonal pond, and several bags of unwanted topsoil donated by my parents. Their soil is chalk, so I have put it towards the middle of the lawn area so it won’t affect any ericaceous plants I grow next to the lawn. I still have 10 bags of compost left to add. And I am over halfway there.

Digging over the lawn area

That is, halfway there in area. In terms of work it may be less than halfway because most of the area I have dug over so far has been dug over before. I am now coming to the part which was seeded by the builders and has never been cultivated. I have dug up three large chunks of breezeblock, a tub of tile adhesive and several plastic bags, among other things.

The forecast is good, and I have some leave from work coming up, so if my back can hack it, then the lawn might be sprouting by the end of the month! What I need to do soon is to try and estimate whether I need any more soil to finish the job, and order it if I do need some.

Since my last post I have been slowly but steadily getting on with laying my stepping stones in the right hand side of the garden. I put eight around the pond, and then five to make a path towards the greenhouse and compost bins. Originally I was going to have six in the path, but after laying them down and walking round them and looking at them through the window I decided that five was better. So I now have a spare slab for if one of them cracks.

I have set 11 of them in mortar. Just the farthest two remain to be set. When I first started laying stepping stones, my dad said I shouldn’t get them completely level because then water wouldn’t drain off them. Last week Callum, one of my colleagues at work, said the same thing. I find it amusing and flattering in equal measure that they should think I would be capable of getting a paving stone so level that water wouldn’t drain off it. In the picture below you will see that I am using three spirit levels in a desperate attempt to make the slabs less wonky. Sometimes I do manage to get one of them nearly level, but as far as I can tell, that seems to be governed as much by chance as my skill.

Stepping stones around pond and to compost bins

The algae I tried to stick to the pond edge (see last but one entry) all got blown off or kicked off by pigeons. Blobby algae doesn’t work. Strandy algae is what’s required. Should have listened to my boss. Story of my life.

Fortunately the pond is now cultivating its own supply of strandy algae so I can gradually hoik it out and layer it on the pond edges.

I am always taken by surprise by the rate of growth of plants in summer. Moving plants from an unsuitable location to somewhere they like has made a huge difference and the garden is showing the most exuberance I have seen since I started the Renovation Project. This is the path going up the left hand side of the garden.

Left hand side path

Little Alice Hoffman, who I thought had died one winter, is now enormous and jostling for space with my variegated holly. The geraniums would like to grow all over the path. And the euonymus europaeus is giving next door’s Leylandii a run for their money.

I was gutted about losing the Willowherb Elimination Stakes for the 18th year running.

Willowherb setting seed

The Blagdon Green Away turned the water brown, which I suppose counts as less green, but didn’t do anything I could detect to the algae. Meanwhile, the watercress is thriving, but seems quite happy to exist peacefully alongside the blanketweed. My next plan is to remove as much of the algae as possible by hand and stick, and then put some barley straw in, which has just arrived by post today.

The weather has finished filling my pond for me, and I have trimmed the edge of the liner and buried it. The pond is now fully operational and ready to start filling up with green slime, like the other two (it has already made a start on this). According to standard pond advice, I am now supposed to hide the liner. In due course there will be plants around the pond which will partly hide it, and I intend to glue some cobbles to the shallow parts of the pond, which will help disguise the folds. But I have no intention of going all out to pretend that there isn’t a liner there.

However, if someone comes up with an original idea to hide the liner… that’s different. My boss (yes, the one who gave me the idea of digging the pond 3 feet deep) said that he draped algae across the edge of the pond and moss grew on top of it. And I thought this was worth a try, especially as I have to get the algae out of the raised pond sometime, and I have to put it somewhere. I think my algae is more the clumpy sort than the drapey sort, but I don’t think the moss will care. So, this is the result.

Pond with algae edging

There is the risk that at least 25% of the three readers of this blog will laugh at me, but I’ll just have to put up with that. And given the ease with which moss grows on my roof tiles and in my lawn, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work. If it doesn’t, I’ll just put the algae in the compost bin.

This is what my raised pond looked like after I had decimated the algae.

Raised pond with algae

I then added some Blagdon Green Away to the raised pond. This is supposed to work by clumping the algae together, and then I need to apply some Sludge Buster, apparently. I will leave it to do its stuff – it doesn’t say how long it’s supposed to take – and see what happens. I think some of the pond life is already grateful that I have removed even a small part of the algae.

Let’s skate again

After digging out the interior of the pond yesterday, today’s job was to put the liner in and fill it up with water. I had plenty of leftover liner from my other ponds to use as underlay. The instructions said I should use sand underneath the underlay but I thought that was not going to be possible for a pond with such steep edges as mine. I think it’ll be all right with just the underlay.

My liner measured 4m by 4m. That is big. I opened it out and then folded the edges towards the middle, and put it into position, then opened out the folded edges. That part was quite easy. The hard bit was trying to arrange the folds neatly. I bought a PVC liner rather than a butyl one because when I went to the garden centre, they didn’t have any butyl liner the right size. Although the PVC was much cheaper, it has the disadvantage of being more rigid than the butyl liner. The butyl liner would have been easier to arrange in folds, I think. I decided to have a rest from trying to deal with the folds, and went in and had a cup of tea. Then I decided that I needed a tuck at each vertex and went out and had another go. By then the sun had come out and the liner had softened a bit in the heat, so the job was easier.

I started filling the pond up from my water butts. I managed to get nearly up to the top before the water ran out. As I don’t want to use tap water if I can help it, I will have to wait for some rain before going any further. I also have the pleasant prospect of spending an hour at a garden centre, choosing some aquatic plants to go in them. In the meantime I pulled out some pondweed from my raised pond, rinsed the green slime off it, and gave it to the new pond to be going on with. I will let the pond settle, and then trim off the excess pond liner and bury the overhang.

Octagonal pond almost full

I think the shallow sloping areas (front and back) will encourage birds to splash around. I may glue some cobbles onto the liner on the slope. Note that I will definitely glue them on. If any loose cobbles fall in the pit in the centre they will never be seen again. I am also going to use plants around the pond to partly overlap the liner and maybe a few rocks here and there. I don’t want the shape of the pond to be concealed after all the trouble I went to to make it a regular octagon.

Yesterday I reinforced the edges of the pond by applying some mortar all around the outside edges. This seems to have done the trick – today they felt very solid. So today was the day for digging out the pond.

I decided that I would have two marginal shelves on the left and right as I looked at the pond from the kitchen window, and a gentle slope going from the near and far edges so that any visitors who don’t want to live in the pond permanently can get out. This left a section in the middle with a square cross section for me to dig out to a depth of 3 ft. So I got going.

I soon realised that while going to a 3 ft depth may be excellent from a pond ecology point of view, there were some substantial engineering and health and safety disadvantages. I made rapid progress up to about 1 foot because the soil is sandy and quite soft. After that, the rate of increase in depth of the hole slowed considerably. The deeper the hole gets, the harder it is to remove soil with a spade. I could have done with a soil removing tool like the one used by the man who replaced our lamp post last year. I began to entertain dark thoughts, such as whether my boss’s suggestion about the depth of the pond was nothing to do with the needs of the wildlife but was revenge for what I did to the academy XML census files last week. Eventually I stood in the hole and removed the subsoil in handfuls. I also had to consider what to do with the subsoil. I decided to put it in my empty bags of sand. I used 13 bags by the time I had finished. Fortunately my soil was well behaved and did not cave in. When the liner is in place, the weight of the water should hold the sides in place.

It was difficult to get the exposure right because it was quite a sunny day, but here is my best attempt at photographing the hole.

The hole

And the tape measure close up:

The depth of the hole

And here I am standing in it:

Standing in a 3 ft deep hole

If you are wondering how I managed to get the earth out of a hole of such a small cross-sectional area, I did it by repeatedly folding myself in half with straight legs and arms. I couldn’t crouch down to get the earth out because there wasn’t enough room. I decided that the blog would not be enhanced by the inclusion of a picture to demonstrate this technique. The two bits of crazy paving to the right are there in case I needed something to step onto in order to get out of the hole. Fortunately I didn’t have any trouble extricating myself.

When I had finished, I put two square plastic planters in the hole, so it wouldn’t be full of cats and foxes the next morning, and took a final picture.

The pond dug out with marginal shelves and slopy bits

I still don’t know whether digging the pond so deep was a good idea or not. Although there are shallow edges, I am worried that animals might fall in the deep bit and drown. And when the time comes to clear out the pond, I will have to get a bucket on a rope and haul it up to remove all the water. But if it really doesn’t work, I can always lift out the pond liner and fill in the hole a bit. As for what to do about the subsoil, I have a cunning plan. I intend to mix it half and half with compost and put it into the lawn area. I think that overall that should be equivalent to top soil, and will mean that I don’t have to buy as much top soil when it’s finished.

After destroying the first version of the octagonal pond, I have had to wait for the right weather and for the exams to be mostly over. A week ago these conditions were met and I made a start on the second version. This time I used tape measures, bits of string, planks and a large set square, and I was pleased to find that I managed a layout that looked near enough right.

Edging under construction

I put the four sides which were parallel or perpendicular to the patio edge in first, and then added the diagonal edges. The diagonal edges were easy because they had to fit between the other edges. I used two short pieces of wood to line them up. Then I filled in all the gaps, and I got a pond edging that lines up with the greenhouse:

Octagonal pond in front of octagonal greenhouse

The edging is not perfectly level, but the amount it is out by is the width of a single thickness of pond liner, which I think will be good enough, given that the liner will inevitably have folds in it. And if you view the pond from a diagonal, it STILL looks like a regular octagon. Amazing.

Octagonal pond viewed from a diagonal

I now need to build up some mortar around the bases of the bricks to make them more secure, so that when I trip over them they are less likely to be dislodged. And then there is the small detail of digging out the pond. My boss said that he dug his pond out to 2 feet deep and afterwards regretted not digging it deeper, to 3 feet. I thought that if I dug my pond out to 3 feet, my back might regret it later. But then my boss’s specialist subject is ecological biology and creatures that live in ponds so his opinion is probably worth taking some notice of. And I like a challenge…

Today is the fourth anniversary of Dave’s death. The rhododendron I planted on the first anniversary died, so today I planted another one.

The rhododendron, the tortoise and me

Before I planted it, I dug out all the soil and replaced it with soil from elsewhere, mixed with a good helping of ericaceous compost. I never found any evidence of the cause of death of the last one (e.g. vine weevil). I hope that if there was anything lurking in the soil that was responsible for killing the last rhododendron I have got rid of it, and that the new one will do better than the last one. The new one is a dwarf purple rhododendron called Impeditum.

This year’s garden ornament is a tortoise.

Rhodendron Impeditum and a tortoise

RIP, Dave. One day I will finish the garden and get all the algae out of the pond, I promise.

From this week onwards I am no longer doing extra hours at the day job. Until now it has been impossible to find time to do anything significant in the garden, and the winter rain and storms have also prevented any progress. But now I am back to 18.5 hours a week, and I am back in the garden!

My opening move was to pressure-wash the patio. This is more of a health and safety issue than a cosmetic one. Pressure washers were on offer at B&Q, so I went and bought one, and here are the before and after photographs.

Patio before pressure washing

Patio after pressure washing

After reading the dire warnings about being careful not to wash animals, car tyres or myself with the pressure washer, I thought it would be fearsomely vicious and would have all the grouting off as soon as look at it. But when I tried it with the standard “spray lance”, I was underwhelmed. Although the original colour of the slabs was appearing again, it felt a bit like cleaning them with a toothbrush. However, when I tried the “Dirtblaster”, I made much faster progress. I think it took about an hour to do the area photographed. I now need to wait until the patio dries, and sweep off the loose dirt. And, unfortunately, some bits of grouting. The grouting was in a poor condition before I started, and redoing it is another thing on the list.

It’s a good thing that the instructions do remind you to be careful what you wash. Once the sprayer was in my hand, it was very tempting to use it on things that weren’t really dirty, like the drainpipe, or mains cable, or the camellia. Fortunately I was able to to resist and focus my attention on the sandstone.

When I had finished the pressure washing, I turned my attention to my attempt at making an octagonal pond edge. I had decided in a review on Sunday that it was such an awful job that it was beyond redemption and I would have to start again. I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to remove my work, but it turned out to be a doddle – a few taps from the pickaxe and it was in pieces. The mortar didn’t even stick to the concrete blocks, so I can use them again. It just shows that if a job’s worth doing badly, it’s worth doing really badly.