Border control

Recent storms have seriously worried our tired East fence. Hubby's made some emergency repairs but they're only stop gaps. It needs replacing. Strengthening one's borders is just so on trend in Europe this Winter... *rollseyes*

We'll be delegating the carpentry to our mate. He's not due for a little while, which buys us time to clear away the shrubbery. This is double edged though, as we suspect the mature vegetation is now an integral, structural component of our shabby larch lap boundary.
 

There've been some hasty repairs during the Winter storms

A sword of power

The other year I bought Excalibur - a monster of a hedge trimmer. Time to wield it once more.

We've got 30m to clear so this is no time for subtlety. That goal has helped nip in the bud the usual dithering - no point in spending the whole day finessing the first metre; GET ON WITH IT!

We started with the biggest job - the North East border by the side of the drive. Even if we don't get the full length of the fence cleared, making a dent in this overgrown mass will be a significant step.
 

Before & After

Woohoo! What a difference. Some shape to that border looks great :) The fence, however.... :/

Discoveries

As we hacked through the thicket/border, some interesting things came to light. Now I think about it, I'm sure the TV gardeners have said that pruning is a great opportunity to check the general health & well being of your plants...

 

Disease

Bracket fungus on the broken bottle brush branch

In the depths of the bottle brush thingy there was a lot of dead wood. Not only dead but mushroomy. Looks like a large branch has broken near the base, & some time ago too. All of that has to come out, in case the fungus stresses the living bits.

New plants

Surprise! More plants!

Initially I thought "Wow, up to the yellow conifer all ready!" But when I stepped back, I realised I had unearthed a similar, separate, shorter conifer. Right. Just what this place needs...

Hard against the fence there was something else, but completely different. A clump of arrow straight, bright mid green stems. No idea what it is - it's bambooesque, but the leaves are wrong. I've cut it back to the ground & we'll see if it regenerates.

Litter

On the house side of the big yellow conifer I found the only litter stash of the day. I'm amazed there wasn't more. I used to find all sorts of treasure in the old hedge... but then that was a border with public land, so I've clearly not thought this through. Anyhoo...
 

Roof tiles, succulents &...

...a duck's head. Obvs.

Given the rather random mix of items, my best guess is they were dumped as the previous owners were clearing out... Who knows...

Team work & fitness

I can plan, but I'm also prone to getting caught up in the moment. If I've been putting a job off for a while, when I finally commit to doing it I tend to charge in headlong. But my energy is not boundless. When out walking, Hubby & I use a "percentage knackered" scale - if we're getting toward 50% knackered, it's time to head back. We had to instigate this cos I can be more stubborn than my body is able to cope with. Mind over matter is great in theory, but when the matter conks out, it takes the idiot mind down with it...

So, I would've done this job alone, bagging up the trimmings as I went. But hurrah! Hubby mucked in & tidied as I hacked.

1st load of several

And a bag of kindling for the fire

With the two of us on the case, we got the bulk of it done - all the way up the drive to the house.

There's a few bits left - at the side of the house & then by the South Lawn, but these will be a doddle as the borders are smaller & the plants less massive.

How heavy is heavy?

When I bought Excalibur, the reviews were divided: "Too heavy!" said a few. "Absolute pish" others replied. Of course, how heavy something feels to you depends on how strong you are & how long you're holding the damn thing for...

Excalibur is quite heavy for me, but has been fine as long as I take regular breaks to let my arms recover. During one such break in this job I realised my left hand was losing the ability to grip my drink - a sign of my forearm muscles getting a caning I think. Excalibur is a 2-handed sword, so my left arm was getting way more exercise than it's used to.

By the time we'd bagged up the last of the day's trimmings, I was proper goosed; a good 70% knackered. Fortunately the sofa wasn't very far away, so I adjourned there... for the rest of the weekend. Come Monday I was still pretty achy, & then on Tuesday my right groin gave out down the skate park - definitely not a place to be nursing flaky muscles.

Rather than attack jobs like the Tazmanian Devil, I wonder if I can get into the habit of 'little & often'...? Probably not.

A few weeks later...

Panels? What panels?

Another storm came in. Yep, those plants definitely were protecting the fence from the worst of the weather. Oops.

Ah well, less demolition required when the fencing folk arrive.

Update

New fence is in!

Looking golden in the evening sun

The fencers were super speedy & the new boundary was up in 2 days. Rather than panels between the posts, we've gone for individual boards, so we can smoothly follow the curves of the slopes.

Hedgehog hole all part of the service.

Much better, & the neighbours are happy too.

RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch 2016

2nd year doing the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch here in the Big Orange Hoose. It snuck up on me this year & I nearly missed it. Maybe I should tick 'yes' to emails... nah, they'll only send begging spam & piss me off.

It was baltic outside so I stayed in, loitering by an upstairs window overlooking the South West corner of the garden - that's where the bird feeders are, so it's a hot spot for flighty visitors.

I spy...

The hour zipped past. Hardest bit was trying to count the same species at the same time in 2 different locations - the bird table at the end of the garden, & the extra feeder by the back door we put up late last year. It was worth the effort though cos not all species hit both sites.

For example, if I'd skipped the back door feeder, I'd've missed this year's highlight: 2 Bullfinches. They took the top 2 perches for about 5 mins. They just sat & troughed, pausing occasionally to 'come & have a go' at any chancing Great Tit.

Nice of the Bullfinches to match their outfits to the house

Also new this year was several visits from a mid-sized Tit with a black cap & pale buff chest. Apparently this could be either a Willow or Marsh Tit - they're almost identical in appearance. The names don't help either as they're both found in soggy woodland, & we've got plenty of that over the fence. These guys are best distinguished by their song... & I had no hope of catching that through the double glazing.

Nice to see lots of regulars too, & some great behaviour - the Robins & Blackbirds enforcing territory; the jittery Jay hoovering the crumbs - such a nervous soul for such a big bird. There was a great stand off between a Tree Sparrow on a feeder perch & a Nutthatch who was hanging on underneath, pecking at the Sparrow's feet. The Sparrow did not budge.

Scores on the doors

As submitted to the RSPB:

Bird	Count
Blackbird	4
Blue tit	3
Bullfinch	2
Chaffinch	3
Coal tit	2
Dunnock	1
Great tit	4
Jackdaw	10
Jay	1
Magpie	1
Marsh/Willow tit	1
Nuthatch	1
Robin	2
Tree sparrow	5
Woodpidgeon	2

It'll be nice to do some year-on-year stats in the future. Yes, I did just say that.

No Woodpecker this year, which is a bit of a shame. We've seen less of them in 2015 in general. But they do still visit occasionally to have a go at the peanuts. So cool :)

Can we smell Spring from here?

A generally mild Winter has confused the crap out of the plants. Some early germinators have already been kiaboshed by a recent sharp frost. Will Feburary slap more over-keen upstarts in the chops?

The usual suspects

Hellebores in pink...

...and white

 

Mini iris is more of a surprise

Nice to see last year's multi layer bulb pot still has some go in it.

 

&... erm... a dead mole

This wee one didn't make it :(

3 part hack - part 1

Radio silence

Not a lot of writing last year, but not a lot of gardening either. Sometimes life clubs you round the head & you have to take time out.

Some folk find gardening helps when they're low. Not me, unfortunately. I tend to hermit myself away to get better. Sadly, neglecting the garden becomes just something else to get anxious about. However, I know I'm coming out the other side when I find myself pulling on my boots & grabbing the secateurs...
 

Pruning

It strikes fear into the heart of the dabbling gardener. The nemesis of many. The TV experts smugly smile as they assure & reassure us that pruning is easy; nothing to worry about. But that's why I started this blog - I've a 50:50 success rate with things like pruning. It seems no matter what I read before I cut, I always find out, when it dies, I had the exception (I'm looking at you, Hebes...)

But I try to be brave. After all, if we don't prune here, our garden will become part of the woods & the lawns will be reclaimed by brambles.
 

Reigning in the brutes

In the mature garden that came with this house, many shrubs have romped. With each one there's the task to identify what it is & then decide what we want to do with its shape.

Typically, the plant most in need of a haircut remains an enigma - still no idea what it is. But it overhangs the drive & gets bashed by delivery vans.

Pruning issues unpicked

Unpicking what I've read about pruning over the years, I suspect the reason the advice seems so complex is the experts are addressing several issues at once, without telling us they're doing that. From what I can see, it breaks down like this:

1. Will I kill it?
1. Will it regrow from old wood?
2. If I prune it at this time of the year, will it be more vulnerable to disease/attack/weather?
2. Will pruning lead to a better plant?
   More fruit, more flowers, more manageable/attractive shape.
3. Will it look bad this year?
   Losing this year's flowers/fruit.

I've ordered these from Crisis to Is That Even A Thing. When you're unsure what you're doing, the key issue is the 1st one - the others are just laughable whimsical luxuries; potentially so ludicrously expert considerations they're not even on the radar.

Most of my pruning still focuses on Question 1.

Will I kill it? Old wood or green wood

This is the big one. The plant can probably recover from any other pruning mistake.

Some plants you can scalp back to the ground & they'll happily throw out new shoots from the base. Anyone who has tried to prune a privet to death, & failed, has experienced this.

However, some plants can only produce new shoots on green wood - this or last year's growth. Cutting too far into the old wood is how I've killed at least 2 Thymes. I've also seen plenty of conifer hedges trimmed back into the old wood that never green up again.

If you don't know what's right for your plant, definitely look it up. If you can't find the info, err on the side of caution.

Will I kill it? Making it vulnerable

Dormant
For most things, the advice is to do major pruning when the plant is dormant, which usually means in Winter.

If you hack at it in the Summer, when the plant is in the middle of its big number, it risks throwing its sap everywhere & not having enough leaves to feed itself. This probably won't kill it, but it'll put it under a lot of stress, which can be the shoo in that attacking insects & fungi are waiting for.

Frost damage
Pruning in Winter can leave the plant more at risk from Jack Frost nipping at the cut ends. However, this isn't usually a death sentence. The damage tends to only be 1 node's worth - it'll just mean it'll re-sprout a little further back from where you pruned. Besides, the plant is used to a bit of Winter battering - that's why it does the dormancy thang in the first place.

Disease/attack
Just like us, when a plant gets a cut, that cut can get infected. If the sap is flowing, it can be party time for insects such as aphids. Also, if there's fungal spores around the cut, there's a risk that the sap will take them into & around the rest of the plant. These risks are minimised when you prune a dormant plant.

Summer trims
All of which makes it sound like you should only prune in Winter, but that's not strictly true either. It's often fine to do small trims in the Summer - you can see the final shape better when the leaves are on. Plus, dead heading is a pruning job & that can encourage the plant to produce more flowers for longer. Just leave the big hacks 'til the plant has had its Winter general anaesthetic.

Tell me I'm wrong

So if you're more expert than me (not hard), & you're reading this thinking "Well, that's wrong, & that's total horse", please let me know & I'll correct it.

An experiment

So, given all that, I'm at step 1 with the leggy shrubby drive-side thing - trying not to kill it. Last year I tried a light test prune: if I chop it back into the old wood, will it regrow from just behind the cut?

The result: a bit meh. It put on new growth (yay!) but it was a bit pathetic (boo).

We'll have to take this gently then.
 

Working with what we've got

Hacking it right back I suspect will just kill it. But leaving it fairly big is not all bad - the leaves are now mostly about head height, revealing some interesting branches below.

Interesting stems

I've heard about 'lifting the crown', often used to give a more architectural shape to trees & big shrubs, so I think I'll try that.
 

A prune in 3 parts

For less vigorous plants, I've read that pruning in 3s is less traumatic for the plant - take out a third in the 1st year, another third the next year, & the final third in year 3.

This is my plan.
 

Before & after

Apologies for poor pics. My vision's starting to change, so it's getting hard to tell if I've taken a decent photo :/ plus I'm impatient...

A little off the top

Thinning out the sides

It really doesn't look like much does it? But the clippings filled the dumpy bag* to over half way.

* The huge sack you get when order sand or gravel in bulk.
 

I did prune, honest

Doing the heavy lifting

Off to the tip with trimmings, & I was a little nervous. Last time I went, the staff just about barged me out of the way to tip the clippings into the skip. I fucking hate that. It may take me a little more time (a whole minute), but I will do it myself, & if I need help I will ask. What strength I have will evaporate if others do the all heavy lifting for me. It's a fine line between politeness, micro-aggression & overt sexism.

Fortunately this time they didn't spot me til I was all done :)

Volunteering at the Crisis allotment

Recently, a gardening crisis means fretting that it's been an age since I actually got out there & did something. But not today.

Work recently instigated a Corporate Social Responsibility programme, so we now get 2 days paid leave to do volunteer our services to anyone who will have us. A mate of mine works for Crisis so I put my name forward to do anything for them that didn't involve rattling a tin out on the streets. To my delight, they suggested I spend a day helping out on their allotment - score!

The Greenfingers project was set up 3 years ago by Cath, a therapist at NECA & keen gardener. Securing allotments is one of the dark arts, often a long game of patience. Cath side-stepped the usual wait using the traditional man-on-the-inside technique. A previous client already had a plot & put in a good word with the committee. In 3 years, Cath & her volunteers have transformed the vacant plot.

Recently, NECA have started collaborating with Crisis on the project, which is a great fit as the organisations have overlapping concerns. The volunteers at the garden are a mix of staff members, clients of NECA & Crisis, and their support workers. Dom is Cath's equivalent from Crisis, & he teaches DIY skills.

The main agenda for the day was: Paint the new shed. Installed recently as a classroom & bad weather bolt hole, their new shed is great, if controversial - the team are taking some heat from allotment neighbours about it, so we best get painting quick.

The rain kept off most of the morning & we got the lion's share of it done with me on the roller & my colleague Mick doing the fiddly bits by brush.

When Barry, a project client, arrived & looked like he wanted to join in the painting work, I handed over my roller & snapped a few pics.

I also got chatting to Alfie (the aforementioned man-on-the-inside) & he insisted on showing me around his own plot (mostly veg, small koi pond) & that of his neighbour (hens, dahlias). Alfie is in the middle of tidying up from a recent unwelcome visit - some vandals got in, smashed up a bunch of his pots, wrecked a number of plants. So sad, but he was remarkably chipper about it all. He also insisted I take a small round yellow courgette & a house plant.

Back at Greenfingers as a light drizzle started & it was lunchtime, provided by the Crisis Skylight Café. Some of the veg grown on the plot supplies the Café. The gardeners are also preparing to enter the Civic Show this weekend, so Cath was busy selecting & preparing the entries. Rest goes home with the volunteers.

Shower passed & sun back out, Mick got busy with a second coat of stain on the shed, while Barry & I moved on to riddling. Riddling. It's a great word. I remember my Dad using it, but couldn't remember what it meant.

Dom has made a series of raised beds. These are being filled from the spoil heap made when they dug the pond. But the spoil includes all manner of junk including rusty nails, broken glass, stones & huge lumps of clay.

By rubbing the soil over & through a wire mesh, we break up the bigger lumps & fish out the crud.

On the route between the heap & the bed, Barry pointed out to me a rain-filled bucket. The pond might not be finished yet but the pondlife has already moved in. An hour or so later, as we moved a bit of pond liner lying on top of the heap, we spotted a frog too.

By mid afternoon, Dom has finished building another bed. Barry & I riddled a first barrow-load into the new container before Cath called it a day. We wandered home with a bag each of allotment swag & the slight ache from doing something physical all day. I'll enjoy my stretches at yoga tonight.

Multi-layered bulb pot

Last Autumn on Gardeners' World, Monty looked at getting a succession of flowers in a container by planting multiple layers of different bulbs. Seemed like a great plan to me. We inherited a few weedy pots with the house & the largest of these would be ideal for experimenting with this technique.

Then, I just happened to be mooching around a local supermarket when I spotted some Spring bulb offers. Little boxes of all sorts of things. I checked the flowering dates on the packets & picked 4 that would flower in sequence, if all went to plan.

2 for £5? I'll take 4 :D

*Edit* An eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that I haven't explained the planting arrangement. Sorry.

I thought I'd taken photos of the planting up but no. I may've hallucinated that bit. Deffo losing the plot.

Anyhoo: the bulbs' boxes suggested different planting depths. IIRC I put them in 3 layers: tulips on the bottom; then a middle layer of 2 types & a top layer of 1. I tried to place the bulbs so they weren't directly over each other, so the stems of the lower ones wouldn't displace the higher ones. As they were all due to flower separately, I placed them evenly around the pot, so it didn't look lopsided.

Sprout!

They're ALIVE!

Cut to... Spring & from the kitchen window we can see some shoots. Yay! They haven't all died horribly due to overcrowding. A good start.

First flowers up were the mini Iris:

Little irises...irii?

What absolute gems.

They all came out blue, not mixed as it said on the box, but I'm not complaining - they were beautiful.

The daffs also made a show but I forgot to take a photo. Sorry. The box says miniature, but that must refer to the flower head as these had long long necks. A nice surprise was that they were double headed, a bit like the Tete a tetes I bought the other year.

At the mo, these gorgeous tulips have just done over:

Golden globes

They should call this one Fruit Salad

I've not seen this type before, with circle after circle of petals. Stunning.

& we still have the honeybells to go. No sign of their flower heads just yet but the box says May-June so it may be Midsummer before we see them up here.

Thus far it's been a great show in front of the kitchen window, so I'm declaring the multi-bulb pot experiment a success :)

Solidarity shed

Last year's house move meant some gains & some losses: we lost our greenhouse but we gained a shed.

We've not had a shed before, so that's quite exciting. The garage at the old house was mahoosive so most of the gardening stuff went in that: plenty of space, & alarmed too, in case some random scroat decided they just had to have our late 20th century flymo...

New garage is too small to house all the gardening stuff tho, so some of it had to go into the shed. But the shed was in a sorry state when we arrived: a leaky roof had left it sodden. It desperately needed some TLC.

Looking a little forlorn...

New hat

At some point it would be great to have a go at greening this roof, but new boards & felt will do for now.

New boards & felt

Thanks Hubby :)

The new roof gave the shed a chance to dry out, for the 1st time in many a year. Amazingly the walls & floor were still serviceable, so time for a smart new jacket.

Pick a paint scheme

Inspiration came from a couple of different sources:

• Last Summer, a mate revamped her shed in fabulous beach hut style.
• Also last Summer, Cuprinol had an ad of a little geezer buzzing round gardens, being sad at neglected sheds & delighted at brightly painted woodwork. Repainting the shed need not mean "Once all over in shit brown".
• Sochi. Yep, the Winter Olympics. & Putin & his goons & their anti-gay laws. & then there's the ongoing state-by-state fight in the US for gay marriage. I'm still stunned that some folk get so het up about which people choose snog each other, & try to dictate who people fall in love with. I'm also amazed at the grace & humour with which the LGBT community campaign. So I've been feeling the need to fly the rainbow flag in solidarity... & cos it's the best flag :)

The LGBT rainbow flag has 6 colours, which is handy cos the shed is 18 planks high at its tallest. It's all coming together...

Supplies!

Down the shops I was delighted at the range of colours available. But it wasn't all about the aesthetics, I had some practical requirements too:

• Water-based. I'm sick of the faff of oil-based paints. They smell bad, take ages to dry, require undercoats, are bad for your skin, are a bitch to clean off your brushes, then a special trip to the Household Waste Recovery Centre to get rid of the mucky thinners. Total palaver.
• Stain, not paint. Paint will flake & I'm trying to keep maintenance to a miniumum... That might be optimistic but hey.
• All colours from 1 range. This is a half-baked theory that, if they were designed as a set, they'll work better in combination & will weather consistently. Worth a punt...

Bit of a problem with the last rule: some ranges didn't have all the colours. So I took pics of the sample blocks:

That's none of yer shit brown...

And used Framatic to make my own colour chart:

& the winners are...

OK, so the red is the Coral it says on the tin, & the purple is actually Fushia pink, but I think it'll work.

Obligatory perspective tin line-up shot

Get cracking

When approaching jobs, I often like to do the hard bit 1st. It gets it out of the way whilst I've got the beans to tackle it, then I can coast when I'm knackered.

But not this job. This was done in a right old higgledy piggledy fashion.

Top down, to postpone scrabbling around on the floor

2 colours down - so far so good

I took the guttering off to paint behind - I'm not completely slapdash...

The back of the shed is shaded by the beech hedge. The boards got greener the closer they got to the floor. If I want vibrant colours all round, that'll need sanding back. Out with the power tools!

The flat sander is noisy but waaaaay quicker than sanding by hand

Some painting sessions involved sitting on the oil tank to do the window side:

The long reach radiator roller came in handy

What about the door?

Missed a bit...

The boards that make up the door don't neatly divide by 6. Continuing the horizontal stripe might work, but might look a mess if I can't do it well. Solid colour then? Would be a shame.

Then my mate Roger, an artist, had a suggestion: Offset vertical bands, a bit like Tetris. Genius!

Out with the chalk:

No formula here:
draw a line, then have a guess where the best place for the next line is

Yep, I think Roger's idea will work beautifully.

There will now be a whopping great intermission

That's as far as I got last year. I watched the unpainted wood get repeatedly drenched over the Winter, never getting the right combination of dry, warm (enough) & motivation. Pants. Have I mucked it up? Will the colours of next year look obviously different from this years? & is this just some lazy Grand Designs-esque fake jeopardy to inject some drama? (Clue: No)

Chip away at it

As the evenings lengthened this Spring, I tried to nibble away at it. Even if I did one colour on the door in an evening, it would still move the shed forward.

& it worked: in no time at all the door was done, along with a sneaky 2nd coat on (most of) last year's colours. Yay!

Wow the camera really blings some of the those colours...

So that's it then - all finished?

Well, not quite, cos the door wasn't the last bit. Nope, I'd avoided the whole side by compost corner. I managed to knock that off one sunny weekend.

Finished!

& I've not done the metalwork yet. Nor the inside... Hmm... there's a lot of spiders in there...

But the outside is done & looks better than I imagined. I posted a photo to Facebook & the Solidarity Shed got a whole lotta love. Thanks guys :D

The epilogue

While writing this post, we had sunshine with showers, & this happened:

Yay for April showers... in May

Paint the whole world with a rainbow :)