Autumn Leaves

Some fine colours and patterns in the garden at the moment.



Can't remember what this is called! NOT Boston Ivy though.


Zebra Grass


You'd never know about the grass in front of the bench now. The area is much more level than it was and can be counted a success!

Bark

The bark was delivered on Wednesday. I estimated three bags and calculated five, so ordered four.

From The Surprised Gardeners

I had help carrying it up the garden...




But it took a long time!




And we missed a bit. Today we are going to see if we can spread it out a bit, rather than buy a new bag.


The finished section. It looks good this deep, not sure if it will still look as good after having shifted some around.

Another tree goes...

One of the apple trees has been scheduled for the chop, and today we took action. It has always grown too fast and this year produced three apples, that all went bad.

Harriet guarding the tree?

From The Surprised Gardeners

1 minute later

From The Surprised Gardeners

The last step

From The Surprised Gardeners

Later after all the bark moved around...

Finally back in the garden!

Last weekend was a complete write off. Tamsin horizontal, feeling awful and me under the weather and juggling three kids. It also lashed down all Sunday. Not good, especially with me back at school.

But in the last couple of days of the long holiday I did manage to finish the steps and get the raised beds in situ.


I made it level using the soil dug out from behind the steps, and the bargain basement laser level from screwfix ;)





We have also eaten some of Tamsin's multi-coloured carrots. Poor crop this year though. I think there were only two, so they had to go a long way.


This weekend we got a fair bit done too around managing the kids and catching up with sleep. It is not often you get "before and after" in the same shot, but I managed it in this one. Finally I got round to clipping the front hedge.




And the finished article:



The best things in the vegetable garden are the carrots and the squash. Elizabeth was practising her photography skills with these today.

Carrots and back to the steps...

We got some carrots today, not that many, but enough for a photo. I fear that we need to pay much more attention to the soil in the veg patch and not trust to luck.


I also went back to the steps today, after two weeks of damp holidays and a few days of recovering and feeling lethargic. Tomorrow we head off again, and I wanted to get something done.

I had decided after an idea from Dad, that the top step would have to be the bottom step. This left a problem of what to make the bottom step and to solve that I decided on "stone" there is already "stone" at the top of a pair of steps feeding in to the lawn and the new chair will be on a "stone" plinth. I am just going to be adding to the "stone". Getting the bottom step out was not too hard, but pleasingly did require some force. Hopefully I have not affected the second step too much though it definitely shifted a little.

Fortunately I had two bits of stone lying around and only needed to buy one more. One is slightly chipped, but not enough to notice and one has a very fortuitous break that follows the line of the garden...

From The Surprised...

I was not the only one working on steps...

Absolutely cream-crackered...

So, five steps back in, two to go, but I am out of cement and sand. Even if I did have them I am devoid of any energy to do much let alone stagger inside for a drink and a calming blog.

Current developments:

The huge volumes of cement...

Four in!

Five in!

Now to have a nice cup of tea and ponder when to pick up my daughters who are desperate to be home early.

The mystery of the growing railway sleepers...

Ten years ago I buried some rubbish soil behind the sleeper steps towards the back of the garden. I remember flippantly saying "in ten years I will have to deal with that". Actually it was eight years. Ah well. I am certainly paying the penalty. It is brutal hard work, and I am missing the pint of blood I donated yesterday!

I have had to dig out beneath and behind each step and then mix cement to pour in. I am rubbish at cement mixing, and am also probably digging out too much so it is taking a long long time. I am not helped by the roots stretching across that make spadework very difficult, or the large stones I hid there so long ago.

You can see the progress I have made in the photos. It has been very very slow work, and as you can see from the last one, pretty exhausting.

3 down, four to go. This one had grown overnight. When I came to put it back the hole was 10cm too small!

And now for a smoothie!

Starting on the steps...

Glorious day today. I returned from clearing out my lab at school and found I had 30 minutes to spare before lunch and going to give blood.

So I had a play with the sleeper steps to see how big the job was. Initially the builders put the steps in, but I gave them the wrong instructions so had to redo it myself. I remember the sleepers being enormously heavy.


I found that they are not so heavy now! Partly due to me being stronger no doubt and partly due to their somewhat rotten state. Here the steps are with no sleepers. Lots of digging and cement mixing tomorrow I fear.

Mowing and a new mower

Today I bought a new hover mower, the cheapest flymo I could find (£62 from homebase). It is mostly to mow the verge in front of the house but I used it to cut the whole garden from top to bottom today. The blasting Sun had all but scorched the grass and there had been negligible growth for weeks. Then when the rains finally came last week up shot the seed heads. My cylinder mower doesn't touch them and I pay the girls 1p per one to keep them down, but the flymo is a bit more efficient, albeit more expensive.

Mowing the front of the house is less of a chore than I expected. It is not ours, but the contractors who maintain it hardly ever come. My neighbours have shamed me for years now by keeping their half very trim. I finally caved in when it was looking particularly tatty and strimmed it. I continued with the strimmer but it is not a long term solution. The verge looks a lot better for being mowed. Our neighbours have planted flowers too, but I am trying to avoid battle. But maybe some flowers around the street light would make it easier to mow? Aargh, stop me.

From Surprised Gar...

The raised beds are dismantled and waiting for a whole series of events before being put in to use, namely:

1) Relaying the sleeper steps on to cement beds - they are getting a bit wobbly.
2) Moving the wavy wooden stake line (90 degree clockwise rotation, but needs to key off the top of the steps).
3) Levelling the top garden where the beds are going to go.
4) Buying and laying black weed suppressant sheeting over the levelled garden
5) Buying and wheelbarrowing the tonnes (and loads of money's worth) of soil and bark that will be needed in the finished area.

I got the bill for the wood for the beds - a little over £350. There is a LOT of wood there and the beds are huge and unique so I think it is a reasonable deal especially when compared to pre-fab ones that are less robust and nasty. Without the mistakes and if I had ordered exactly the right volume of wood it would have been around £320 I imagine. C'est la vie.

The grass I top-dressed looks OK now, though unfortunately the soil was mixed with builders sand and there are some pretty large (5mm) stones in it that got through the sieve. I guess they will disappear over time.

The finished beds :)

In and out during the welcome rain today, I managed to finish the raised beds. One silly mistake cost me 30 minutes and meant I was glad for the extra wood. I also changed the design as I went along to make things easier. Pretty happy with the end result.

From Surprised Gar...

Now I just need to find the tonnes of soil to fill it, but this can wait. I have to level the final place for it and move a low wooden stake fence that I put in to keep the girls play bark in place. Moving the stakes is not too bad but the levelling is going to be nightmarish.

We were very pleased to have some relatively decent rain today, enough to slightly reload our aqueduct-fed water butts. I think it takes about 10 hours for them to fill though, so we need some serious rain!

Raised beds and sunflowers

Mum asked me why I was building raised beds today. Good question. I think it is because they are aesthetically pleasing and that I enjoy the process of building them. Anyway, here is the design and the progress so far. I have got faster and faster at sawing and chiselling but have also been conducting experiments on how much more comfortable it is to hit a chisel vs your knuckle. Ouch.

The vision:


Progress:


More progress (the only downer is that I seem to have ordered too much wood. I got a bit confused whilst juggling the maths and a 2 year old...):

I am embarrassingly pleased with them so far. I hope they fit! Still lots of work to do on the top garden before they can be put in their final resting place.


We also put in the family sunflowers. We each have one and the tallest wins.

Grass and a sad medlar

Normally Sunday is our best work day but I did not give much time to the garden today - glorious weather and the garden should be enjoyed too. I did find time to yank out our very sad medlar tree. This used to be on the top level but we moved it last Spring to make room for the kids' climbing frame. The weather for the move was perfect, though it was a little late. The tree thrived for two weeks and then we had five weeks of blistering March/April weather. I watered it every night but it was not enough. The tree produced leaves this Spring but it was half hearted and nothing much else happened. The fact I could pull a 10 year old tree straight out of the ground tells the story of how sad it was. We'll get a new one. Medlar jelly is delicious (though the cooking process produces the most hideous muck imaginable).

I also found time to top dress an area of the lawn that has been low for ages. I dug up the turf a month or so ago but did a rubbish job. The top dressing was dug out of the lawn borders (French drain?) when I replaced the "mower killing" stones with soft bark. The white fleece is to give some shade to that area. The lawn gets blasted by the Sun and a little shade makes a massive difference.

From Surprised Gar...

Background...

We bought the house from a church in April 1999, and we live in Uttlesford (NW Essex, UK). The garden had been ignored for probably 40 years (we found self sown trees and counted 40 rings). The garden slopes up from the house by about 4m over about 45m and is 15m wide. Uphill is West, the left hand side is South.

We both grew up a distrust of "gardening". Thomas liked mowing but nothing else. But the overgrown garden needed serious attention. We spent 6 months hacking away and spraying with Roundup, finding the contours of the garden and sketching up a basic plan. There was so much ivy and other rubbish that when we got in a digger to turn the garden in to our plan of three terraces we lost an awful lot of topsoil. As we have learned, we have found that this fact, the clay/flint soil we have make for continual challenges that we are generally too lazy to attack.

The garden:

From Surprised Gar...