Planting a copse

Old Shrubbery

Our big project of the weekend was to get the copse planted at the end of our garden. I have a fantasy in which we harvest wood for the house from coppiced trees. It will be a good few years before many of these babies are up to being harvested but we have taken the first few steps.

Plant of the week: Daisies

Daisies

It's been a very busy weekend in the garden here, I'll be posting about it soon. But for now here is a photo of the plant that I am so pleased to see in our lawns here. We don't have many daisies but it is lovely to see our lawn slowly travel away from it's original monoculture into a far more interesting mix. This is a small established clump but the few that I transplanted a couple of weeks ago are also looking well.

Time management

I've never been great at managing my time but recently I have been getting worse and worse. I've also noticed that now that my boys are older they also seem to be requiring more of my time too despite gaining more independence. Perhaps it is because I used to be able to do two things at once when they were smaller but today they will require my full attention. Regardless of the reason the amount of time at my disposal feels as if it is shrinking daily.

Spring meadow

Narcissi slit planted between the groups.

There is so much to do in the garden at the moment but so little time. Here I've been working in what I'll call the Spring meadow. It mainly lawn with mature trees but this time of year there are large areas of narcissi. Lovely, but it feels a bit like municipal planting at the moment with large groups plonked here there. As removing them would probably be an exercise in futility and they are much loved by the early bees I am doing my best to extend the groups. Digging into the middle of a blind bunch I can harvest lots of plants that can be slit-planted throughout the rest of the lawn. I can get away with this as the bulbs are small.

Knuckle down to weeding

Fist veg bed, before

It's been a long time since I have done any work in my veg patch. The rain has made working here pretty much impossible. Having said that I am glad that I didn't prep the beds any sooner as the heavy rains would have leached much of the goodness from any added compost.

Trees!

Ever wondered what 39 trees look like? Here's a photo I meant to share in a previous post. Most of these are only 1yr whips and they are currently heeled into my veg patch waiting for more clearing to happen in my coppice to be.

Coppicing

Hazel stool

Thanks to the water logging we haven't got very far with this years pruning. I tend to prune plants very heavily and then leave them a couple of years to recover. If the garden were smaller I would probably rethink this but it works well for here.

Spring clean

Our neighbours have always kept the exterior of their property tidy but this has recently been taken to extremes with their regular brushing and tidying of the gravel. It all seems a little over the top until you realise that they are trying to sell their property and, in the process, are trying to make it look as good as it possibly can. Unfortunately, if you turn your back to theirs you will be faced with ours, a lot less pretty.

I admit it, we hadn't tidied up the front of our place for two years. Thanks to the tractors driving past there was a vast build up of muck, soil and weeds along the bottom of our front wall. Not only looking a little grotty but pretty disgusting. It didn't help that we still had a pile of subsoil sat on our driveway left over from some building work 3 years ago. The regular brushing of our neighbours had it's effect, we decided that it was time to smarten up a bit!

It is amazing what a few hours of hard work can do. J removed the subsoil pile and generally tidied up the driveway. This also included a drastic prune of our wisteria that was beginning to take over the roof of our garage and looked as if it intended to cover up our solar panels. I grafted at the front, removing most of the plants from our little border and introduced a couple of large primulas and snowdrops. My rose, that hasn't been happy for a while, had a drastic chop too and will hopefully come back bigger and better. But the hardest work was cleaning up the edge of the road. There had been such a build up of muck that all sorts of weeds were flourishing that needed hoicking out.

It was hard work but I was amazed at how quickly it all pulled together. Just a couple of hours of hard labour and our home looks so much more inviting to visitors. The results may not be comparable to our neighbours but it is no longer an embarrassment.

Looking at the lawn

crocus

Spring is definitely on it's way. I cannot miss the crocus' that have pushed their heads out of the earth.

Good bye young oak tree

Damaged tree

This weekend we have had to say farewell to one of the prettiest trees on our property. It was a lovely oak that was damaged a few months ago in storms, we found that it had split down the middle. Since then it has been braced with ropes but that hadn't prevented the split from continuing down to the base.

Plant markers

Slate markers seen at Stourhead Gardens

Earlier this year I noted the slate markers at Stourhead and thought that they were a great idea for community gardens.

Spring cleaning.

Garlic cloves in modules

Okay, it isn't yet spring but the sun shone for a bit. I had a busy day getting started on the garden. When I say getting started I mean doing what I could without having to step too often onto our still water saturated land. So the shed it was then.