What did you do in your garden today?

[cntrlwagdnr]

Your garden always looks so nice. Ours is low maintenance, not so fancy. Rainng here too. 'bout all I have left to do outdoors is drain and flush the motorhome waste tanks and winterize it. Furniture cushions are already in. Took all the decorative stuff off the bar yesterday. Guess I'll make some sourdough bread today.

 

[Sean Regan]

Your garden always looks so nice. Ours is low maintenance, not so fancy. Rainng here too. 'bout all I have left to do outdoors is drain and flush the motorhome waste tanks and winterize it. Furniture cushions are already in. Took all the decorative stuff off the bar yesterday. Guess I'll make some sourdough bread today.

Thanks for the kind words.

Our youngest son and his partner have just come home from a holiday in Scotland in a motor home they hired.
Now, as they are both fifty, they are thinking of buying one. They feel that they'd like something with more of "the creature comforts."
They have in the past travelled all over Europe in this, they've had for fourteen years, which he restored, (she made the curtains).
But selling it would be like "parting with one of the family."

 

[Esther Knapicius]

Start the leaf removal process. More to fall still. Just front right now. Pacing myself.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Yes, leaves coming down. The grapevine in the greenhouse is bare and cleared up, but as Sean says, it is too wet to pick up leaves outside at the moment. On the plus side there was a lot of wind with the rainstorms yesterday, so all the leaves are up against the leeward hedge. There are masses of small sticks and twigs come down under the oak tree as well.
Been a bit busy with other things too, visiting children and in-laws. It was all very nice, but I have kept out of the way of people so much and so long it all felt a bit dangerous.

 

[Esther Knapicius]

This is the before picture of above. BTW, they are not all down, just have to start or its nuts. The back yet to go another week. Have in the past tried to find help, no one wants to work, even at Ten Dollars an hour cash. One day I will probably have to find a company and pay big bucks. Wonder how much to rent one of those trucks with the big vaccum hose on it, but then where do you drop the leaves.

 

[Sean Regan]

I got on top of leaf collection yesterday.
There will only be a few more now to come down from the acer in the front garden. Fortunately, the azaleas and rhodos don't shed many leaves.
Those I collected half-filled the green bin.
I'm photographing into the sun here. The "yellow bits" in the azaleas is just the light shining through.

I mowed the back lawn which collected a lot of leaves, then collected quite a few that gather in the trough between the lawn and the border.


The rest I blew to the back.
If it stays dry this afternoon, I can get behind the azaleas and rhodos and sweep up a lot of them. I'll leave some to rot down, but collect those from the rhodos as they don't.

I'll then "attack" next door's silver birches with my Fiskars lopper I recently extended, where they overhang our garden. There's a lot of straggly branches.




If I do it now before the leaves start to fall and the wind blows them into our garden, there will be fewer to collect later.

 

[Esther Knapicius]

Have more dropping, lots more dropping. We rake till February. Just as long as no snow I can.

 

[Sean Regan]

It might not look much different, but the number of overhanging branches I took off next door's silver birches, with my long loppers, even after laboriously reducing them down with my secateurs, was enough to fill the green bin.





Still some right at the top, but I'll leave them for now.
At least I won't have the catkins and leaves with which to contend, from the tree at the right-hand end of the line, as it's died. It's hard to see, but there's some did branches to the left of the middle of the photo.
This garden wasn't watered during the dry spell. I watered mine, so the other trees would have got some water from below our garden. This one is next to our garage, so would have got none.



As usual, there will be some work to do on one of our two acer palmatums.
This one is looking a bit scruffy.



The number of dead branches, like this one, might give rise for some concern, but it happens every year.



But they are always replaced by new growth at the top.



Every few years and this will be another one, I'll put a net over the top and tie it down, to get the branches to adopt the dome shape I like and also reduce the spread to make it less dominant.
Some branches won't respond to the treatment, so will be pruned off and others may have to be wired to fill in any gaps, in late April.

I'll take the net off once they've "set" which will be early April.

We've had it since it was a baby, in 1986, it's the one nearest the lamp, the other one died.




We've had our moments with this acer.

We had a "frog pond" for decades. It started to leak twenty years ago, so I removed the perimeter stones, added a new liner and re-cemented the perimeter.
Since then, the acer slowly started to force up the perimeter stones.

A year ago, I decided to get rid of this pond. Several years before a hedgehog drowned in this pond, although there were rocks at one end for small frogs to get out. We didn't want the same thing to happen again to our hedgehog.
After removing the perimeter rocks, this is what I found between the two liners.



I carefully removed the sand and replaced it with a lot of ericaceous compost and topsoil. Then replaced the perimeter rocks to form a bed for cyclamen.
The acer was none the worse for the disturbance in August.


Aear

 

[Oliver Buckle]

I have a bed about eight foot by four that I have emptied and which is one of the more recent to come under cultivation. I put a lot of compost into it last year, and it is sloping and drains well, which means it was fairly friable despite starting off as clay and it having rained heavily for a few days. I dug a trench down the length of it, filled it with not very wonderful compost then repeated moving across each time and putting the spoil on the compost in the previous trench. Then I put a large barrow of really good kitchen waste compost on top with some bone meal, a small amount of farmyard manure, and a bag of wood ash, spread it out, worked it into the top four inches or so and then raked it over pulling the clay balls that didn't break up to the ends. I will pick them up later, put them in the greenhouse to dry, and then dump them in a fire. Lastly I limed it fairly thoroughly. After I have given it a while to settle and I have raked in the lime I am planning on planting shallots and garlic soon. Bit stiff this evening.

Watered in the greenhouse a bit. Planted five broad bean plants in each of the two buckets I made up, one with solid wood in the bottom, one with twigs. It will be interesting to see how they compare. The beans were left over from planting a row and I had put them in pots to fill any gaps, but I seem to have got 100% germination

 

[Esther Knapicius]

Raking, dragging, blowing leaves.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

I have taken the top few inches off a piece that has never done that well and found solid clay just below the surface. I dug out a couple of bucketfulls of the heaviest clay and put them in the greenhouse to dry before they go int a fire. I was left with a trench about four inches deep, two foot wide and eight long. I have been pulling into country laybys and find there are all sorts of odd bits of wood scattered along the verge. I filled the original trench so it is about four inches higher than ground level, hammered stakes in all round the edge and put old toung and groove between them to keep it tidy. Then I put six very full bucketfulls of sticks blown off the oak tree on top and worked them with the hoe so they disappeared between the larger bits of wood. Followed that up wit two large wheelbarrow loads of half composted stuff mixed with leaves picked up with the mower. I worked that in wit the rake and put another layer of edging all round to lift me to about eight inches above ground. Tomorrow I am driving over to Brighton way to help a friend's daughter with editing, so I will be exploring more laybys for wood. When that is packed down with twigs and compost I will put the earth back on top, mixed with some nice, well rotted, kitchen compost. It may not be exactly to the rules of hügelkultur, it's using what I can get for free, but I think it should improve things a bit.

 

[Esther Knapicius]

raking leaves. pulled my car around back, and tied a rope and hook to a shrub that really was not doing well. Heave hoe, and out it came with the car . easy.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

raking leaves. pulled my car around back, and tied a rope and hook to a shrub that really was not doing well. Heave hoe, and out it came with the car . easy.

Made me smile, a different world. My 'round the back ' is a bit over a hundred foot long by maybe fifty or sixty wide, and access is by a covered alley between the garage and house that I can just about get a wheelbarrow down, there is nowhere to drive a car even if I could get it through. But this is England, people comment how big my garden is
Not doubting the pull on your car, but that it came out easily may be part of why it was not doing so well. It sometimes seems to me that the main part of the plant is the root, the bit we look at on top is just an extra to catch sunlight and hold up the reproductive organs. When you get fruit trees with specialised root stocks it becomes obvious that the root dictates the form the top part takes, and we are just finding out all the other stuff roots do. Trees actually communicate with each other through their roots, and when a tree falls the stump can be kept alive by the offspring surrounding it supplying it with nutrients and moisture via the connected roots. When I have taken out failing plants for people I often find that there is a problem with the roots, either an infestation or disease, or the planting simply wasn't done right and the root has failed to escape into the surrounding clay and is 'potbound' without a pot. Problems with plants, don't worry about the bit you can see, get to the root of things.

 

[Esther Knapicius]

@Oliver Buckle , My actual garden size is 3 acres, with a 10 acre protected woods in the back and to the sides. Yes, easy to drive the cars around to the back. Makes life easy when bringing home some heavy landscape bags, to just drive the car to the area, back it in and toss to the ground. Also dump trucks can make it about to deliver mulch if needed. We have a lot of trees on the property, 6 summers ago, had a company take down 6 of them, they used a 180 foot bucket truck, lifted pieces to the front to chop up etc. even lifted over the house. So that particular shrub I took out, had a good long chance, many years in that position, needed to be gone. I do have a tread on here called "welcome to Esther's garden". In general, have over 400Thousand bulbs, many sizes of garden beds full of plants that lean toward happiness in shade. Our back valley garden the latest still in the works. We have a gazebo down there, so to give you a size idea, from the back door of the house, it is 98 casual paces to the gazebo . Also on the property we have 2 unattached garages, the garden shed, the house has an attached garage. other hobby of husband is cars. As I age, I wonder if I can find someone who will care about all we have done.

 

[Sean Regan]

Worst time of the year for me.
First job today....well, this afternoon.... was stripping the dead foliage from this wisteria and tackling the bed full of leaves.



I also gave it a bit of a prune, removing some long thin branches, as with the other wisterias, it'll get its main prune between Christmas and New Year.

I stripped these two acer palmatums, of most of the dead leaves, but there's more to come off. But I do it by hand to avoid damage. I'll then be able to prune off the dead branches. The big one is likely to need some branches wired to fill in any gaps. I'll then put a net over it and peg it down, to get it back to the dome shape I like. If I don't, it spreads too wide and dominates the garden too much.

I'll remove the net once the new leaf buds start to show, by which time it should have "set."
The smaller one just needs the dead wood removing, as they both do every year.

Mowed a lot of leaves off the lawn and blew a lot more to the back of the border.
I'll get behind the azaleas and rhodos next week to gather them up.

By this time it had started raining, there's a lot of leaves on the two patios to clear, but I'm not doing that in the rain.