Helen's Garden Renovation Project

I have now positioned seven of the ten paving slabs that I plan to use for stepping stones. Last week I put four between the apple trees.

The day after planting the apple trees, I decided to give them an extra stake each because strong winds were forecast. Today we have a red weather warning for storms in Scotland, and it’s pretty breezy here. I think the extra stake was a good move. In due course I will remove one of the stakes. Maybe. If I remember. I will also find something more attractive to put at the end of the path than one of my cat repellers.

I have also laid three stepping stones running up the side of the shallow pond. I planted the rhododendron to the left of the stepping stones. The rhododendron has grown enormous and it was very difficult to plant because its branches are so low down. After putting it in the hole I thought, sadly, that I would have to prune it.

But then I decided that I didn’t have to prune it very much. I just took off some crossing branches and trimmed the ends, and removed any stems I had broken while planting. Maybe I’ll take some more off after it has finished flowering in February. I have left plenty of room between it and the Elaeagnus because the Elaeagnus will grow much, much bigger, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the rhododendron did too.

Some time in the future I am going to have to decide what to do about the stepping stones in the long term. I have laid them straight onto soil, and used a spirit level to make sure they are roughly level and at the right height. I have lined them up by eye, not with poles and string. I think I would like to get in a professional to lay them properly on mortar and make sure they are nicely lined up, but if I do that, I will have to delay planting around the stones until that has been done, or the plants will only get in the way. It is not easy laying paving stones, especially when they turn out to not be exact squares and the surface is irregular.I think it will be essential to grow lots of plants in between them to hide any imperfections in their positioning.

You may think the slabs look too close together. I have positioned them 18 cm apart, which means that the distance between them matches my stride length. They would probably look better if I moved them further apart, and I would not need so many of them, but they would not be as comfortable.

I will not extend my line of three paving slabs any further in the same direction. The reason is that the pond has a very sharp corner which I don’t want to be tempted to walk into. I will divert the path off to the left, and plant something next to the sharp corner to make it very difficult for anyone to get near it. I may need extra stepping stones, but they don’t have to all be the same type.

So now I have nearly finished establishing my routes, and the apple trees and the rhododendron can get on with establishing their roots.

Today was a mild day with no rain forecast and I decided that now was the perfect opportunity to move the apple trees, even though they have not lost quite all their leaves. I moved Discovery first because it was nearer the destination holes than Charles Ross. First I dug a trench all round the tree.

Then I started shoving my spade under the root ball until the tree could be gently pushed over. I thought it would be heavy to lift, but it was very light. I tried to take as much earth with the roots as I could, but much of it fell off when I picked the tree up and carried it to the hole.

You can see that the root ball is quite small. I hammered a stake in at about 45 degrees like the books say you should, and tipped in two bags of organic compost as well as some soil, stamped it down and tied the tree to the stake with half a pair of old tights. The books say you should use rubber ties, but I should think tights would be just as good, and cheaper. The books also say that you should have the stake facing the prevailing wind, but I have no idea where the prevailing wind is. In my garden, things fall over in all directions. Neither do I know what they mean by positioning the stake into the prevailing wind. Do they mean that if the wind is coming from the north, the end of the stake that isn’t buried in the ground should be north of the end that is buried in the ground? Or the other way around? They don’t explain. So I decided to put the stake in at a direction that I thought would be aesthetically pleasing. One thing I am absolutely sure about, though, is that a stake is necessary. Compared with the Leylandii roots, the apple tree roots were pretty feeble.

Then I dug up Charles Ross and moved him too.

I ended up positioning both trees slightly to the right of where I had originally planned to put them. Charles Ross was a bit too close to the hedge. I also pruned them both a bit, but not very much. I am very pleased with how the trees look. My garden is beginning at last to look like a garden again.

But the side fence now looks very exposed.

Moving the apple trees was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I thought the roots would be harder to cut through and that I would have difficulty lifting the trees and carrying them to their destination. What was quite difficult was the planting. It is quite hard to hold an apple tree upright while shovelling soil into its hole. It is also difficult if you want to see what the apple tree looks like from the patio before you commit to planting it that way round. The easiest way to deal with the soil is to heap it up all around the hole, and then scrape it into the hole with the side of your foot, while holding the tree up. When enough soil is in there to keep the tree vertical, you can then nip off and take a look from a distance.

However, despite the task being easier than I thought, I am now suffering from an assortment of aches and pains and have taken some ibuprofen. I hope that I will be recovered enough next week to either lay some stepping stones, or plant something else.

The apple trees are close to losing all their leaves.

This means it is time to start the removal process. This means digging the destination holes first, as it is important (1) to find out if the earth contains any just cause or impediment why I should not plant the trees in it and (2) to plant each tree as soon as possible after it has been dug up to minimise the chance of the roots drying out, getting frozen etc. It is very lucky for the Garden Renovation Project that this is such a mild autumn, as it looks as if I will get in at least another month’s digging before there is any chance of the soil freezing hard.

So I dug two holes. I put two sticks in them to simulate apple tree trunks and see how they would look.

I think I may have put the trees too close together. I don’t want to move the leftmost tree any closer to the hedge, so I may move the rightmost hole a little to the right. I will think about this next week.

If you were wondering why I don’t plant the trees in a line parallel to the hedge, it is mainly because there is a soakaway between the rightmost hole and the hedge. Also it will be necessary to get access to the hedge in order to trim it, so I don’t want to plant two trees right next to it. So the apple trees have to go parallel to the lawn edge. I may raise up the earth a little behind the rightmost tree and plant some small winter colour plants like cyclamen or pansies. Next winter. When I’ve finished digging.

The pictures are courtesy of my new Panasonic Lumix FS35. As long as I manage not to drop it in the pond, I expect it to supply many more blog pictures over the life of the project.

We are now having proper autumn, with lots of leaves and lots of rain. The shallow pond has filled up as far as it is going to, and my gamble over the mortar join did not pay off. This gamble was to paint over the mortar around the edge of the pond with Pondseal and hope that the join between the mortar and the liner was watertight. Well, it isn’t. This means that in spring, or whenever we get the next prolonged dry spell, I will have to drain the pond, chisel a neat edge to the mortar, clear out any gunk in the gap, and fill the gap with purpose-made sealant. I am not all that bothered about doing this because (a) I thought I probably would have to anyway and (b) I also want to put some cobbles around the sloping side and I will have to drain the pond before mortaring or glueing them in place.

I was slightly more disappointed to find that the repair of my second water butt has not worked. It is dripping steadily from the base of the strip that I stuck over the hole. However, the repair of the first water butt is still holding, and the repair of the second is still an improvement, as the second water butt joined to it has been able to fill to the brim, which never happened before because the water drained out of the first water butt too fast. I decided to stop the leak temporarily by emptying out all my water butts into the raised pond, which seems to be holding water nicely. The water is now about two inches above the marginal shelf. I estimate that this is about one-third full. By spring it should be completely full, no problem.

And the final disappointment is that my lovely Canon G9 camera has got an E18 lens error, which means that the lens won’t retract fully when the power is turned off. You would have thought that this would just mean it won’t fit in its case any more, not that it won’t take any more photographs, but unfortunately it won’t work any more. I have tried all the suggestions on the Internet except taking the camera to bits. In my experience, nothing good ever comes of taking things to bits.

The Coronilla seems to like being planted against my house wall.

The reason I have a Coronilla is that Burncoose Nurseries accidentally sent me three when I ordered something else, and didn’t want them back. I gave away two of them, and planted the third against my house wall because it is very sunny there and that is what it is supposed to like. I got it in January this year, after the freezing cold December last year, and so I don’t know how it will do if we have a very harsh winter again. But for now, here is a close-up of some of its flowers.

I have dug a hole in the marjoram patch and put Alice Hoffman in it, as I am worried about her getting cold. Although she is a hardy fuchsia, there’s a difference between being hardy in the ground and hardy in the pot. All my other plants have survived two severe winters so I am reasonably confident that they will get through whatever this winter throws at them.

The apple trees have lost only a very few leaves. Some of them are going yellow, more on Charles Ross than on Discovery. I reckon three weeks should do it.

While waiting for the apple trees, I went to Wisley last Friday. Here is a picture of a Euonymus alatus, otherwise known as a Winged Spindle or a Burning Bush. I wonder if I can find the space to squeeze one of these in.

And now I am stalking the apple trees, ready to pounce the minute they go to sleep. While I am waiting, this is a good time to take stock of what I have achieved so far.

The hedge at the back is now about two feet taller than the fence at its highest point. I expect it to have grown another two feet by this time next year, and of course it should also thicken out considerably.

Behind the pond are stacked 20 bags of organic compost from The Compost Centre, ready for my autumn/winter planting. If you are wondering why I have put them around the Pieris, it is because the Pieris is a big plant in a lightweight pot, and it keeps getting blown over. The compost should put a stop to that.

The raised pond still contains only a dribble of water. This is because it has hardly rained at all since I painted it. The shallow pond also contains only a dribble of water. This is because I gave it a thorough cleaning after painting the render around the edge, so I could remove all loose bits of mortar and mortar dust. This involved also removing all the water that was in there at the time, in case it had lime in it.

Over to the right hand side of the garden, the lawn looks surprisingly verdant, as if it hopes that I will decide it would be a shame to dig it up and re-seed it. Nice try, lawn.

And the apple trees are still very leafy. My current estimate of digging up time is about a month from now, so 13th November.

The exceptionally fine and dry weather has been continuing, and I suddenly decided it was time to stop looking despairingly at my raised pond and do something about it. I removed the tarpaulin and all its supports, and bailed out the few inches of water at the bottom. Then I got a stiff brush and some water, and scrubbed away at the failed pond paint and the algae, and I sanded the bits I couldn’t reach with the brush, and I kept going until I decided that all the paint that wanted to come off probably had come off. Then I gave the inside of the pond a wash with a damp cloth (the washing water came away dark grey, so the colour was still coming off) and let it dry.

I had to decide what to do about the cracked render at the bottom of the pond. The pond builder seemed to think that removing all the render at the bottom was a bad idea, but I don’t know why. Perhaps he thought I might puncture the liner with my chisel. I decided to pick off all the bits that had come loose, and paint over the hairline cracks.

I wanted to use V8 Pondseal with a black additive to make the inside of the pond uniformly black, but I couldn’t find anywhere, even on the Internet, that was selling the black additive, so I think it’s been discontinued. There are black paints available that are probably suitable for recoating concrete that has already been painted, or partly painted, but I decided that I wanted to get the pond up and running now instead of waiting until I could get hold of some black paint. I knew that the pond would have dried out quite well in the warm and dry weather, and now was a good time to block any more moisture from getting into the concrete blocks that have been used to build up the shelf inside the pond. Later on, when I have done the rest of the garden, I can empty and clean the pond and then apply more paint. There is bound to be something that will go on top of Pondseal (as long as I sand it down well).

So today I gave the pond three coats of paint. The strange thing about the Pondseal is that the manufacturer’s opinion of how much paint I need wildly differs from my experience. I estimated that the area I painted last week to seal in the render in the shallow pond was probably close to a square metre, and I did three coats. As 1 litre is supposed to cover 3 -5 square metres, this area ought to require somewhere between 0.6 and 1 litre. In fact I didn’t even use half the 500ml can that I had. The surface area of the raised pond is just over 6 square metres. That should have required at least 3.6 litres, and perhaps as much as 6 litres. I bought 1.5 litres, relying on my previous experience rather than what was written on the can, and used 1 full litre plus some more of the 500ml can left over from painting the shallow pond. I therefore have an unused can, which I can either return to the garden centre or keep for further work on the shallow pond in spring, once I find out where it needs attention. Or maybe I can use it to coat concrete blocks which I will put in the pond to stand plants on.

So maybe I should feel a little uneasy about the huge discrepancy between the amount of paint I have used and the amount that I “should” have used. Perhaps my render was not porous enough. But on the plus side, the black colour didn’t come off into the paint when I painted over it, so I am daring to hope that I may have sealed in the pigment. And the pond looks black and shiny, so it seems that some of the first lot of paint must have been absorbed before it got washed off.

Yes, I know, you wait three weeks for a blog post and then two come along at once. But I couldn’t resist this. As I was wandering around my garden after the third coat of pond waterproofing, I noticed that my Discovery apple tree was having another go.

I have been convinced for some time that many of the inhabitants of my garden are deranged, and this is clearly another one. I should not have been worried about my apple trees going biennial; this one wants to go biannual.

But it’s still going to get dug up in November.

I have done a little earth moving this month, but the next stage is on hold until the apple trees go to sleep and I can dig them up. Meanwhile, the weather has been much kinder than it was in the summer. I mended my second water butt and so far it is holding water. But even more importantly, this is an opportunity to tackle the ponds.

You can see that the construction of the shallow pond mainly uses pond liner, with some render applied to the side of the block edging. The pond will not fill beyond the join between render and pond liner. So today I have applied some waterproofing compound to the render. I do not know whether this will allow the pond to fill completely, because it could be leaking from the join between the render and the pond liner. But I am pretty sure that the render needs waterproofing. For one thing, every time it rains, a small amount of it washes off into the pond, making a yellow-brown sludge. So I have decided to waterproof the render and see what happens. I have a suspicion that this pond will require frequent maintenance. Some of the render is very thin and is bound to crack and fall off this winter. I can see myself having to drain the pond every spring and patch up the render and apply more waterproofing. Still, applying waterproofing is not too bad a job. The paint goes on easily, and the brush has to be cleaned with cellulose thinners, which smell heavenly.

And next, if the weather continues to be dry, I will lift up the tarpaulin and take a look at the raised pond.

This week has been fine and dry, and the forecast for today and tomorrow is the same, so I decided it was time to try repairing one of my water butts. If it works, I will do the other one that is leaking. I took the advice at http://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/grapevine/top-tips/water-butt-repair_33901.html. This means emptying out the water butt and turning it on its side, then cleaning and drying the area around the cracks, both inside and out. Then cut out some strips of plastic from a milk bottle, coat liberally with silicone sealant, and stick to water butt, both on the inside and out. The theory is that the pressure of the water will hold the plastic in place on the inside. I don’t know whether the plastic on the outside helps with the current leak, but it may add some insulation against future frost damage, and so I thought I might as well put it on.

And here is what the butt looks like on the outside.

The silicone sealant I used is suitable for interior and exterior use, but is not meant to be permanently underwater, so I don’t know how long the repair will last. Given that the water butt will probably develop another leak in the next couple of years, I will be well satisfied if it lasts for two winters before I have to redo it. I used translucent sealant, which I think looks better than white or black, but I realise I am not going to get any marks for aesthetic appeal. I just want to not be sprayed with water every time I go past the water butt after it has been raining.

I will leave the water butt to dry for 24 hours, and then connect it up, and hope it works.

Note added 16 August 2012: This repair lasted for almost a year – today was the first day I noticed that the butt was dripping again. I am going to try the same method but using a sealant designed for underwater use. Search for “butt” in the blog if you want to find out how I got on.