Garden update

Somehow almost two months have passed since I last posted. The absence has mainly been due to being away a lot (work, honeymoon, work), and therefore being pretty busy in the time I've actually been home. 

In between trips, and now that I'm home properly, we've been getting on with the garden. I'll post about all of the different bits of the garden properly with photos, but for now, here's a quick rundown:

Vegetable bed

Today we finally finished constructing the first vegetable bed. It has seemed to take a long time to complete, but eventually we got there. It still needs to be painted (and we need to decide whether to render it first of all), and the wood on the top needs to be stained, but the building work is complete. My in-laws brought down some rubble and we collected some small rocks from our garden to put in the bottom, then added some polystyrene. We then added a number of bags of earth that my in-laws also brought - they had dug some foundations for a feature in their garden and didn't need the earth that they removed. It's not very full yet, but we'll slowly add more earth, plus some ash and compost before we start planting. We're aiming to dig the foundations for bed #2 over the next month.

Apple tree

The apple tree is chock full of apples, so hopefully that means we'll have a good crop this year. Obviously a number will fall in the wind before they're ripe, and some will inevitably be eaten by birds, but fingers crossed we will have plenty to make into apple crumble and put in the freezer to see us through to next year.

Herb garden

The herb garden is now mostly looking quite bare. The grape hyacinths have died back and I've taken most of the stalks out, and since coming back from holiday I've done a lot of weeding in the area. The sweet peas I planted in the herb garden are beautiful, and the tomato plants are flourishing. There are plenty of flowers, however I think really I need to take some of the stalks out to thin them a bit. This weekend I finally dug some holes to put the actual herbs in the herb garden. The rosemary and chives are now sunk into the garden, and today my mother-in-law brought me a bay tree which now needs to join them. This is the area that I really want to start planning.

Fir tree area

Excitingly, the fir trees are no more. My husband sawed out the remainders of the trees, and then dug out the roots with a spade and an axe. There's still one root to be taken out which he's working on, so slowly but surely it is getting there. The main difference it has made is that the garden looks much, much bigger. We can also see the plants behind the (former) fir tree area much better and we now have a new space to plant and do what we want with. For now, we need to take the final root out, remove stones and then just try to keep on top of the weeds. 

Aside from that, I've been weeding, weeding and doing more weeding. I've also dug out a lot of the 'monster plant', collected apples, and pruned various plants including some ivy growing on the back fence.

The next jobs on my list are mostly pruning: I need to cut back our clematis where it's starting to strangle our acer, cut back some other plants (not 100% sure what they are), cut the cordyline back, and top the rowan trees. Other than that, it's a case of keeping on top of the weeding, and starting to dig the foundations for the next vegetable bed.

Next time, I'll post some pictures!

Fir Tree Area

Behind the boat area/herb garden, we have another semi-planted area. Firstly, we have a fabulous Cordyline, which is a big impact plant. It’s quite impressive, and I love it’s foliage. I’m a big fan of foliage and often prefer it to flowers. 

Apologies for the picture of the garden wheelie bin. It's full of old bits of the cordyline though, so at least it's relevant.

Secondly, there is what I originally deemed the ‘monster plant’, because we didn’t know what it was and it looked weird. I think my mother-in-law eventually worked it out, but I honestly can’t remember what it is. The leaves are similar to elephant ears, and it has little sprays of prink flowers and knobbly green root things which grow partially above soil level. It was the knobbly roots that made me call it the monster plant. I’m trying to get it out as I don’t really like it all that much, and would rather replace it with something else. On top of that, it must have grown since it was put in as it has knocked a couple of bricks out of the wall it’s next to. Unfortunately there’s some sort of electric cable running near it so we need to be careful when digging it out.

You can see the electric cable in the photo - isn't the plant weird though?!

We also have a few random plants in this area: a rhubarb, some daffodils, some cyclamen and a foxglove - it’s the holding area really. Eventually these will probably be moved, but for now they are quite happy there. We’re in the very early stages of planning what will be done where, so for the moment a holding bed is quite useful. 

Finally, we had three different fir trees. One was pretty small, one was medium height but with thick branches, and the other one was so tall and dense that it overshadowed the garden. We decided pretty early on that we would need to get these out. I’d prefer to have more trees in the world, not fewer, but they were in completely the wrong place. 

You can only really see them in the background in this picture, but the mass expanse of dark green is quite visible.

For Christmas we were given some loppers, so this spring, we set to work. We were careful to only do a little at a time at first. This was partly to make sure we didn’t disturb any birds that might have been nesting (although we were pretty sure there weren’t any in these trees) and partly so we could see the difference gradually, rather than making a fast, drastic change. The idea behind this was was to allow us to work out what we might want to do with the area. 

We took on the smallest tree first. It wasn’t too much trouble to take off the branches and just leave a narrow trunk. There was an immediate difference in the amount of light coming through, so we carried on chopping.

You can see the little stump on the left. Obviously this was taken at a different time of day to the picture above, but you can see where there is light all around in the left-hand side of the picture. 

Next up was the medium height tree. I managed to get a fair amount of this down, however most of the lower branches were too thick to take off with the loppers and required a saw. Luckily, ever since my husband and I moved in together about five years ago, my in-laws have been buying us tools and equipment as birthday and Christmas presents. We now own a selection of saws, so my husband has been working on tree number two, and there are now only a few lower branches left to remove. 

The largest tree was actually less difficult than the middle one. Most of the branches were lopper-friendly, and after a garden session where I may have gone a little overboard and forgotten the ‘a little bit at a time’ plan, half of the tree was down. I ended up driving to the tip twice in one day to put the branches in the garden waste section, as our garden bin was already full. Since then my other half has removed the rest of the branches, as well as half of the trunk, so a lot of progress has been made. 

Sorry for the appalling photography - I took the photo at totally the wrong time of day. You can see how the mass of dark green has mostly gone though. And you can see my pretty purple rhododendron. No-one would have known it was there! I suppose we'll have to paint that odd fence panel now though.

And voila, tree stumps.

I spent a while cutting the tree waste up, so that we can take it to the garden waste section of the local tip sometime this week. It looks a lot neater than it did when my husband was in charge (by his own account he’s good at making a mess!).

The pile of garden waste as left by my husband.

The pile of garden waste after I sorted it. Not that I'm obsessed with making things tidy or anything.

There is so much more light coming through now that the trees are almost gone. It makes the garden look bigger as well, but for me the light is the best thing. The boat area/herb garden had some areas towards the back right that were completely boggy, and which never got any light. Now the soil has started to dry out, and it looks like I will be able to plant in it. 

We still need to take down the trunks, and in all honesty we might need to get someone in to do that for us. The fun bit can now begin though - we get to plan what we want to put in the area. It sounds like I’ll be planning the planting around the crazy golf course, as when I arrived home from work one day last week my husband started to tell me, in all seriousness, where he thought the obstacles, fairways and holes would go. When I thought about it, I figured it does sound quite fun, and will give me some structure to plan the garden around as well. The ‘fir tree area’ will need some height, either from plants or from something ornamental, however it’s become clear that we really need to make sure that the planting doesn’t prevent the light from coming through. 

One thing’s for sure: it’s going to take some time. Better get cracking...