The three readers of my blog will have noticed that there have been no entries for nearly a month. This is partly because I have been away on holiday but mainly because it simply will not stop raining. The damp weather started at the beginning of April – just after the hosepipe ban came into force. The hosepipe ban was lifted over a week ago, which we hoped would stop the rain, but no.
However, there is some hope that there may be some dry weather next week. When that happens, there will be a lot of maintenance tasks to do. The Willowherb Elimination Stakes are still in progress. And I do hope that one day I will be able to mend my shallow pond.
In the meantime, here is a colour combination that simply would not occur to an average garden designer.
I planted the Crocosmia Lucifer deliberately. The Lychnis just turned up, as it always does, and I hadn’t the heart to pull it up.
I know what the books say about pruning wisteria – you have to do it twice a year, in July/August and January, and you have to cut x amount off each soft traily bit leaving y leaves still on there, and then it flowers. These instructions are clearly written by people without burglar alarm boxes and drainpipes. The only pruning instruction that my wisteria understands is, “Cut off as much as you can without falling off the ladder”. I am still waiting for the part of the process where it flowers.
A kind friend said that in the recent Willowherb Elimination Stakes he was rooting for the willowherb, describing it as “attractive and the way the seeds unpeel is nice (and it is, of course, free and very low maintenance)”. Low maintenance is a good way of describing a plant that needs no encouragement. Maybe next year the willowherb and I will have come to an arrangement where we can live together in harmony.
Another kind friend warned me that I had a demon in the Temporary Pond. I had noticed it had been getting somewhat overgrown, but I am used to having to pull out great handfuls of the pondweed from time to time.
She identified my demon as Crassula helmskii, aka New Zealand Pygmyweed. The RHS and other highly respected organisations have terrible things to say about it, mainly because it is an invasive non-native species. I have no idea whether this is the pondweed I originally bought in 1996 or whether it hitched a lift into my pond and took over from what I intended to have. However, in a small pond it requires little maintenance – just five minutes a month in the peak growing season to rip out a few handfuls and compost them after leaving them by the side of the pond for a few days for things to crawl out. And it IS a good oxygenator, and the pond has always been very healthy with the weed in it.
So I am not going to attempt to eradicate the demon, but I may consider using a different type of pondweed if I ever get the two official ponds up and running.
I have been engaged in the pleasurable but demanding task of eating all the Discovery apples before they go off – they do not store well. I don’t know what they are like when cooked, but it seems a waste to cook them when they taste so divine raw. After I’ve finished with them, I have Charles Ross to contend with. It is a shame that both my apple trees have chosen odd years to bear their maximum fruit load, but perhaps when I move them, one of them will be upset enough to start producing in even years.
And finally… I notice that WordPress is now inserting pictures where I want them, instead of automatically putting them at the beginning of the article and expecting me to cut and paste them. I do not know whether this is because I have a new version of WordPress or because I sacked Internet Explorer 9 (it’s unbelievably slow and crashes even more often than Internet Explorer 8, which is saying something) and installed Google Chrome.
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.
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.
This morning I dug up the magnolia soulangeana in the back garden and stuck it in a pot. I had to cut four or five roots with a diameter of one inch. I also pruned out one of its three stems in the hope that this will give it a better chance over the coming hot summer. I have no idea whether it will survive, but I will water it every two days and hope for the best. It left a big hole behind. I put some of the poor quality soil that came from the side passage when it was paved over into the bottom of the hole but I haven’t filled up the rest yet. I will have to check the plan to see exactly where the hole is in relation to the greenhouse base. If it will be underneath the greenhouse there is no point in putting good soil into it.
I have finished firming and raking the soil in the front garden. I added some 6X fertiliser to the top layer, and sieved the top inch or so of soil, so it looks lovely. The grass seed packet says I should wait four or five days after adding fertiliser before sowing the seed, so I think Friday will be a good day for doing that.
I also need to get on with my tool store. Taylor’s Garden Buildings haven’t given me a quote yet so I will have to send them a reminder. There is also another website I will investigate: Titan Garden Buildings, who are based in Guildford, not far from me.
Today, after all the recent rain, we had a brilliantly sunny and even slightly warm morning. I eagerly got out my spade and trowel, but after digging up the winter jasmine, I found myself wondering what to do. I am waiting for a week or two before sowing my annuals, and in the far end of the right hand border, I am waiting for the many bulbs in there to flower before I decide which ones to keep when I dig them up, and I am also waiting for the lesser celandines to die after squirting them with glyphosate. (I have almost run out of it – must go to Wilkinson’s for some more). I am waiting for the side path to be laid before I work out where I want the toolstores and how big I want them to be, and in the front, along the side of the path that was laid last year, I am waiting for the soil to dry out a bit so I can continue digging over the soil and removing rubble in preparation for planting some climbers.
So I decided to cut back the osteospermum in the front garden, and dig up any layered shoots for propagation. One of the plants has done a bud. It’s not really supposed to flower yet, but this winter some people’s osteospermums never stopped flowering. I also removed as much of my neighbour’s ivy as I could from my fence. In future I am going to keep on top of ivy removal and am not going to let it get out of control again.
The front garden could do with some redesign and renovation, but I can’t take that on at the same time as the back garden. Also there are some problems that need sorting out, the main one being that I don’t own all the land that makes up the patch of land that I see as my front garden. The builders planted some not very good shrubs there ten years ago, and also a cherry tree that may not be in the best of health. I am going to watch it carefully this year and see if it is still alive. I am planning to dig up the shrubs that are definitely on my land and sow grass seed over the area. This will make maintenance easy – no pruning and no weeding, just mowing – until I have finished renovating the back garden and can start on the front.