Sunday 29 March 2015

Marking Out

This weekend hasn't brought anything particularly exciting, but we've managed to get exactly through the list of preparations for the mini-digger's arrival that we drew up at Christmas, which is pleasing.

The last of the patio flagstones are out of the way, and the arbour has been dismantled and moved to the seating area in front of the beech hedge bench (well out of the way). It'll be there for some time, and the arbour is far too heavy to move intact: stacked neatly there, it won't kill any grass, and we can give it a good clean, and a coat of paint, before reassembling it once we get the patio relaid.

We've moved the two dustbins and packing crate, which have been filled with water in an attempt to keep a number of wet/pond plants going since being pulled out of Jenny's pond when she filled it in. The irises are clearly alive, though I remain unconvinced about the others.

Once these were out of the way, we've used a number of poplar rods to mark out the planned edges of the pond, and flower beds in the new colour-wheel garden, and the patio that will form the corner of this. We're happy with how they're all looking, but we've got a few days to consider them from different angles, before the digger arrives on Maundy Thursday.

We've had a bit of a potting up session, putting tomatoes, peppers (sweet and chilli), and cauliflowers into pots from their sown modules. The caulis always look quite sad for a couple of weeks after transplanting, but should be fine, and we've got more of the others than we need. There's a third sort of tomato (Black Russian) still to go, but these two (Maskotka and Alicante) are ready to pot on.

Finally, we've sawn the wood from the shed base (mostly requiring sawing, rather than splitting, as it's drier than we usually split wood, and I think it's oak, to boot), and that's allowed us to lift the base (sawn up and flung into a corner of the orchard, where I'll make a compost bay later this year). It's a relief to discover that there are just three cast-in-situ concrete beams on which the base was supported, and not a whole slab of concrete.

Having got to end of our excavation-preparations, we've been able to do a bucket-worth of plastering, meaning that our bedroom's back wall, and most of the sewing room's bathroom-wall, are now done. Slowly getting there!

Wednesday 25 March 2015

Stones

Liz had today off work, and has done sterling work clearing the last of the stones from the pond location (now forming a growing stack around the periphery of that garden, between the fruit trees), as well as lifting almost all of the patio stones (I've helped with the last, heavy, well-adhered/trapped-by-grass ones) and putting them well out of the way. She's even managed to move all the pots off the grass in the herb garden, so we're onto the last bits and bobs to be ready for the mini-digging in ten days.

Monday 23 March 2015

Planning to Dig

Over Easter, we're hiring a micro excavator (mini digger) to dig the pond, and also do some heavy (quick) work preparing the base for the arbour patio, turning over and creating the beds in the colour wheel, and—time permitting—break the ground for the last of the herb garden.

That's lead to us spending a lot of this weekend (and, for me, today) clearing the colour wheel beds, and the pond, of the collected detritus. For several years, although the colour wheel beds were briefly marked out in April 2012, it's not been much of anything, and has had several heaps of brushwood, a few bins of rescued pond plants, and gradually amassing heaps of stones dug out elsewhere. The pond was, for a while, a huge heap of brush from the trees and cotoneaster we took out, until we shredded that over the weekend of the Royal Jubilee later in 2012. It's been misused in the same way, to a smaller extent, since, though, and Liz has spent a good bit of the weekend running things through the smaller Archimedes Screw chipper we have.

In incredible news, we even managed to mow the lawn, with Liz raking ahead of me, which has really helped, and the lawn looks almost respectable for the first time in months. The wet but mild autumn meant that my hoped-for 'last cut' of the year never happened, meaning a scruffy lawn since September, really.

Inside, we've potted up our various dahlias, and chocolate cosmos. When we were weeding in the herb garden, I discovered that the runner beans tubers (or are they corms, or rhizomes?) had survived the winter. They're a perennial, strictly, but not that hardy, so they're usually grown as an annual in the UK. However, we thought we'd pot them up, too, and see if they come into growth as the year warms up.

We've had to do some more wood chopping, too, to clear a path down the drive for the mini-digger. I think it's wide enough, now, but we shall need to do some more, including a few last pieces on the old shed base. If we have time, digging that bit over with the excavator is on the list, which means I need to clear the firewood off it in advance, and check there's not a huge slab of concrete hiding under the timber...

Sunday 15 March 2015

Rearranging the Fruit Beds

Over the last couple of years, pruning the gooseberries, and then picking the fruit, has been a rather painful, thorny proposition. In addition, the plants have always tended to grow out into the path, which has made the journey along the fruit garden a little perilous when wheeling a barrow, and the wide handles almost always bring you rather close to the gooseberries spines.

Enough of that: we've dug up the nine gooseberries, and replanted them: the three red and green are now spaced out along the centre of the bed where all nine were previously, meaning they're much further from the edges. The three golden/yellow ones are where the bottom blueberry was. It's never really got going, in many years, so we're cutting our losses.

At the same time, we've lifted all the raspberry canes, and replanted the strongest along the centre of those beds: we were finding that the double row wasn't cropping well, and was a pain to weed and pick.

The revolution hasn't ended there, either. We've taken off all the nets, too. Over the next couple of months, I'll be replacing the wires which ran between the posts to support the cages with timber bearers. The roof is then going to be chicken wire, and the sides will either be netting, or wire. However, we're going to have doors at each end of the passage, making it one big contained cage, rather than four. It ought to make weeding, mulching, pruning, and picking an awful lot more pleasant, which seems sensible.

Today we've sawn, split, and stacked a load of wood, and spent this morning sorting out the garage, which now looks like a room once more.

Wednesday 11 March 2015

Tidying the Green Roof

I've had a day off today, though Liz has been working. I started by making a couple of trips to the tip, taking the old bathroom suites, and some other bits. I tried Freecycling them, but there weren't any takers, unfortunately. That out of the way, I did a bit of spring maintenance to the green roof, using a three-pronged hoe on the end of my 4m extendible pole. It's usually deployed for pruning trees, but is equally effective horizontally, for reaching across the green roof, rather than walking on it. That's allowed me to dethatch a lot of last years dead and dry material, with minimal disruption to the new shoots coming up, and has avoided the need to climb on to the roof myself. The green roof's looking an awful lot neater, now, and is starting to come back to life. There were only a few small clumps of grass, which is good, and I was able to uproot them.

This afternoon, I've finished connecting the ethernet cabling, and tested it all, so we now have functional Cat6 ports in the rooms I wanted them, and a few of them can be connected to the four switch ports on the router, meaning faster wired ethernet when needed.

Sunday 1 March 2015

Mulching

As planned, the mulch arrived on Thursday, although it had to be left on the drive proper, rather than the ramp into the garden. That'll make it easier to shovel, as it's on concrete, not gravel/sawdust/woodchip, but does mean further to take it with the wheelbarrows.

My time's been split between helping Liz weed, and moving and spreading mulch: suits me better, as I'm quicker at shovelling mulch and spreading it, and Liz is much better at weeding. It's a long weekend's work, but we've spread two thirds of the 6m2 load, and the long border, quince, sweetpea, copse, willow arch, and herb beds are all looking massively improved for it.

As part of the mulching, we've planted out the three variegated and one spiky-looking hellebores we picked up in Thirsk around my birthday, and a three sedums (S. spectabile 'Crystal Pink') that were much reduced in the garden centre in November. The former are in the copse bed; the sedums are in the front of the sweetpea beds.