Helen's Garden Renovation Project

On Friday morning I checked my propagators again, and found that the salvia and antirrhinums had got going, so that means all types of seed have started to germinate in under six days. So much for the 14-28 days on the packets. Another time I may do some experiments to see if I can get a seed to wait for 14 days before germinating, just to see if it is possible. Maybe the instructions on the packets were written by the same people who claim that their printer prints 20 pages per minute.

I am now the proud owner of 33 baby dahlias. I had thought dahlias would be tricky, because the flowers look so complicated, but they certainly seem to be very easy to germinate. According to the packet, there were only about 40 seeds, so that is an 82.5% germination rate, which I would never complain about, especially for 59p a packet. The petunias have started to germinate too, so they managed it in under 4 days. I am not sure whether the incredibly fast germination rate is due to the temperature of the room. The window is south facing, so it gets a lot of sun, and I keep the radiator on all the time because this is the room I use to dry my washing. But if temperature makes germination faster without any other penalties, why doesn’t the seed packet say this? I just hope that they don’t all die of growing up too fast.

I am somewhat surprised to report that two dahlias have germinated, less than 72 hours after I sowed the seeds. Nothing else has done anything yet. It’s possible that the room temperature is higher than the 15-20 degrees centigrade requested on the packet, but it wouldn’t be much more. I shall be keeping a close eye on the seed trays from now on, given that the seeds obviously haven’t read the instructions.

The weather has been a lot more suitable for gardening recently, with not much rain and a slight amount of warmth. I have actually got a few things done. Firstly, I have bought a tool store. I decided in the end that it would be better to buy two that were not quite ideal than to go to the expense of getting one specially made. Delivery takes 28 days, so I should get it in March some time, and then it should be warm enough for me to put it together without getting frozen fingers. It is only a cheap thing, and it says it wants wood treatment applied every year. Realistically, I don’t think it is going to get that, but at least treating it should be an easy job, with no fiddly bits or windows to worry about, unlike a greenhouse. When I have put some things in it, I shall see what is left over and then work out whether I want to buy another tool store to put next to it, and if so, what its dimensions need to be.

Also I went to Wilkinson’s and bought four packets of half-hardy annuals. That is, two of them (dahlia and antirrhinum) think they are perennials, but in practice they are probably going to be annuals, given that the seeds only cost 59p for the dahlias and 39p for the antirrhinum. (Wilkinson’s seed offer this year wasn’t as good as last year’s, at “3 for 2” instead of “2 for 1”, but their seeds are still cracking good value). The other two are salvia “blaze of fire” and petunia. The annuals want to be kept at 18-24 degrees for germination, so I have put them in the heated propagator that I haven’t used for years. The perennials are happy with 15-20 degrees so I have just put them in ordinary trays with plastic lids on. I will be interested to see which one germinates first, given that the petunia says that it takes 14-25 days to germinate, and all the others say 14-28 days. I sowed them on Saturday 1 March, so I shall be expecting something to happen on 15 March.

I also bought a tray of 10 primulas “Calypso mixed” at £4.99. Although seeds are cheaper, I don’t have a very high success rate with primulas, despite following all the prescribed rituals, like putting the pots in the fridge in plastic bags. However, once I get the primulas outside, they seem to do very well, and I definitely have more than I started with, so I think they are happily producing children without any help from me. If I only get three plants from a packet of seeds costing £2, it certainly makes sense to buy small plants at 50p each. I want to keep the primulas outside in pots with the rest of the portable herbaceous border, but I think it will be too much of a shock for them if I put them outside now, so I am keeping them in the coldest room in the house, and I will put them out during the day as soon as we get a warm spell.

I am still looking for celandines. I found a couple in one of my pots, and sprayed them yesterday. But apart from that, they are nowhere to be seen. I can’t believe that I have actually got rid of them, so I will wait another four weeks before I celebrate. Also, I discovered a creamy-white daffodil at the bottom of my garden. I think they are much classier than the yellow varieties.

We have had a spate of extremely cold weather recently, although it is now gradually getting warmer again. Saturday night was the coldest of the year, and on Sunday morning I noticed that there was steam coming from my compost bins! I know compost heaps are meant to generate heat when they decompose, but I thought that was just for proper gardeners, not me. It does seem unlikely that the compost heaps were able to sustain any sort of chemical reaction in such cold temperatures, so I am not sure why this happened. Still, it was quite interesting. I took some photographs to see if the steam would show, but it didn’t.

It is half term this week, which has given me some time to do things to the garden. I have cleared away a good number of dead leaves and pulled up some weeds. The place is looking very much better now. My fingers do get cold, though, even with good thick gardening gloves. Today I did some warming work – digging up the grass in the area where the greenhouse will go. At some stage I will have to take up the path, but I am not sure how to do that. I think I may need a new toy called an angle grinder. But I will try my crowbar and hammer first.

There has been a surprising absence – or near-absence – from my garden this year. I seem to have very few celandines. In fact, I only found three, which I squirted with glyphosate today. Perhaps I am a bit early to be looking for them. I have never yet succeeded in eradicating anything from my garden that I didn’t want, so I don’t think I have managed to commit total genocide against them, but I am hopeful that I have reduced their numbers.

Here are some pictures of my lovely hellebores (Orientalis). It is quite hard to take pictures of hellebores because they are so droopy and close to the ground, but I did my best.

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It has been quite a rainy January, so I could blame the weather for my lack of progress, but the real reason is that there has been an enormous demand for my services as a maths tutor. I have hardly had a spare moment. This is excellent news for the greenhouse and new pond fund, but not good news for the progress of the Garden Renovation Project.

However, I did go out into the garden at last this afternoon. I removed some dead leaves, pulled up the bittercress, and checked to see if everything was still alive. The osteospermum has produced a flower, and my primulas are still going strong. The yellow crocuses are out but not the purple ones yet. My snowdrops, which I bought cheaply last year after they had finished flowering, have not really done very much. One of them has put out shoots, but the others are still hiding. Maybe they don’t like being in pots. The soil is extremely soggy, so maybe they are too wet. Or maybe it is just that I am about as good at growing snowdrops as I am at growing large-flowered clematis.

Usually the demand for maths tuition increases steadily from now on until June. I don’t want to turn people away unless I have to for lack of space, so I am going to have to formulate a Garden Maintenance Plan until I can do some more Renovating in July after the exams. I am thinking of planting some half-hardy annuals in the place where I grew annuals last year. The reasoning is that I can keep squirting the area with glyphosate until the end of May, thus removing the need to weed it, and when I plant the half-hardy annuals, they will be relatively big and therefore will compete with the weeds on more than equal terms. Well, we shall see.

I am now the proud possessor of a first class honours degree in psychology from the Open University, so I think it is time I started writing psychology gardening puzzles as well as maths gardening puzzles. Here is the first:

A gardening psychologist wants to find out whether gardeners derive more satisfaction from growing plants if they eat them. She sets up two conditions and participants are randomly assigned to each condition. In the first condition, the gardeners grow solanum lycopersicum (tomatoes) and in the second condition, the gardners grow solanum dulcamara. In each condition, half the participants (again, chosen at random) eat the fruit, and half leave it to the birds.

Identify one ethical problem with this experiment.

Today I moved some of my portable herbaceous border to nearer the house. It doesn’t get as much light there, but it does get some shelter from the cold. I wondered whether I should leave the fallen beech leaves in the pots to provide some insulation, or whether I should take them out in case they cause the plants to rot. I decided to take them out, since it is forecast to be a milder than average winter, which probably means rain. Many of the pots are infested with weeds, but I can’t pull them out because the soil is like a brick.

I inspected my new water butts, and found that three of them are pretty full. Unfortunately the new ones are leaking from the tap. The fourth butt had only a little water in it, so I tipped the water out and put PTFE tape around the tap, like I did on my first water butt. A plumber told me that PTFE stands for “Plastic tape, fixes everything”. Quite right.

I have made some actual progress by getting a man in to wire up my water butts. As I said in an earlier post, I have four water butts, but I originally intended to have only three. I have two of them fitted in series to a downpipe at the east side of the house, and the other two will be fitted, again in series, at the west side of the house. They are not installed yet because the rainsaver attachment was too small for my downpipe, and needs an attachment to make it fit. So for now there is a gap in my downpipe. The work took place on Saturday, and on Sunday it rained pretty much all day, so I was pleased to find that one of the water butts was about one-third full. This is not a bad start. The forecast for the winter is: slightly milder than usual, and lots of rain. So I should be able to fill all four of the butts ready for the summer. Last summer I didn’t need to water my portable herbaceous border much, but I expect summer will be back to normal next year.

Apart from that I have carried on with the weeding (still not done, but getting there) and have tidied up my garage a bit because I have agreed to help Father Christmas store a bulky present for the children of one of the neighbours. It is still not tidy enough to store a greenhouse, but it is a big improvement.

This week we have been having brilliantly sunny but sharply cold weather. I have been going out and pulling weeds up, but it is so cold that my fingers get numb even inside my thick gardening gloves. I can measure my progress not only by the clear patches amongst the weeds, but by the girth of the robin that comes and sits next to me while I unearth some juicy worms for it.

The main thing now that is holding up the garden renovation project is my difficulty in finding somewhere that will build two toolstores to fit in the side passage. I have tried two shed shops, but they don’t get back to me. I wish that instead of having spammers who want to sell car parts, mortgages and computer games writing unwanted comments in my blog, I could get some shed shop spammers posting some comments.

I have now learned that actually the winter jasmine is flowering incorrectly after all. It is meant to flower in January. Also, violets should be incorrectly flowering now. Disappointingly, my violets are correctly not flowering. But I saw someone’s rose doing a flower the other day.

I have also learned from my auntie that there are two types of shredders: food-processor types that are noisy but efficient, and corkscrew types that are quiet but slow and a bit fussy about what they will take. The shredder which I have on long-term loan from my very patient boyfriend Dave who bought it secondhand from a bloke in the pub is a Bosch corkscrew type, and it is very quiet. It gets insulted if you give it little bits of stuff, and ignores you until you poke a branch down its chute. But it does shred nicely and if Dave wants it back, I will probably buy myself the same type.