Building the Greenhouse

Well, we haven't actually started that yet, and what with having the heated propogators going already in the conservatory, there is some urgency to it's erection, so to speak! When things need potting on we will need the greenhouse! The weather doesn't look great for it this week with snow threatened, but you never know, sometimes we don't really get snow so much as we are only four miles from the coast at Cromer. We built a greenhouse at our old place and that was a total nightmare, but then again that was a lean-to and my husband tells me they are more difficult than the normal stand alone models, but still I am not really looking forward to the building stage - but very much looking forward to it being finished and seeing my husbands chuffed little face when he can potter in there like a real suburban guy!

Did I mention we had four sheds by the way? Yes, four sheds - and not one of them is currently habitable, in the sense that they are all full of stuff with no room to really potter much. Fortunately my husband is not the type to want to spend too much time away from "the missus" so I don't expect to find him hiding in the sheds...but the greenhouse might be another story altogether!

Building the Gazebo:

Well, we haven't actually got round to that yet, we are still building the base. The site where it is had a gentle slope so we have made a sort of low box which encloses sand, and utilizes again some of those awful concrete crazy paving slabs we inherited. They and the sand are forming the sub-base, I suppose you'd call it, and we are bedding in those square decking pieces, sixteen of them, four square, to make a square base. When it is eventually finished the actual base of the Gazebo, which is hexagonal, will go on it. Then hey presto, follow the instructions, get the screwdriver out, then away we go! (Well, in theory anyway - let's see how blue the air gets when the instructions come out!) But even more urgently, we have a greenhouse to build.

Building a Base for the Gazebo:

Another of today's projects was another instalment of the building of the base for our Gazebo. We have spent a lot of money already on this garden and we never intended or budgeted when we moved in for a gazebo, for God's sake. However, when we realised that the flue from the nearby takeaway blows food cooking smells over our garden every time there is a south or westerly wind, we decided to try to protect ourselves from that. So the plan is to sit in the Gazebo which will have three enclosed sides behind us, with our back to the offending smelly wind. That, coupled with surrounding the structure with scented plants such as Oenethera (Evening Primroses) Nicotiana (Tobacco Plants) and Jasmine, should ensure that we can sit there without experiencing the smell of grease.

Why haven't you complained, I hear you ask? Well we have sent two polite letters to the owners of the takeaway, but had no reply. The last thing we want is a neighbour dispute, especially as we are the incomers. So for now we are putting up with it but trying to do things like the Gazebo and the scented plants to make it more bearable. Did we mention the drummer who has started up in one of the garages round the back? Ah, the joys of the British garden!

The Flintstones Garden Wall:

They (the gardeners) built a very low (ankle height) sort of wall enclosing the path, with a weedproof membrane under the path and mini bark chips on top. The wall was built out of sort of concrete "crazy paving" slabs that had been forming a low raised-bed sort of wall there hitherto. The trouble was it looked like dinosaur teeth in the ground as so many of the pieces were triangular! I said it looks like something The Flintstones would have built - yabba dabba doo! For a while I tried to convince myself it was OK because being an exotic bed and all that...reminds me of the dinosaur attraction at Blackpool zoo..but no, not really. I can't be doing with it.

Today I set to tidying it up a bit myself so it doesn't look so, well, jagged. I think I suceeded but it was hard because the membrane underneath wouldn't allow much further digging, so replacing the stones which were already in place was difficult. Still, I think I have made the worst of the "sharks teeth" stones look better, flatter. It's never going to be perfect because it's not made of even bricks or paviors, just broken up old slabs of concrete! It won't show most of the time because it should be covered by foliage anyway.

The Dinosaur Garden?

So, one of the other things the lovely gardeners did for me was to dig out a bed, using the trench digging method to bury the turf hopefully deep enough that it does not resurface! On the same day as the planting of that Periwinkle stuff and the greenhouse dismantling, they also made me a path through this bed, dividing it into two sections about nine feet wide and seven feet wide.

The aim is to make this the exotic bed, comprising some overwintered (hopefully!) bananas and cannas we brought with us and a trachycarpus we bought recently, along with lots and lots of dahlia and canna tubers I have been buying since we moved here. The front of the bed will consist of small hebes and grasses, spiraea japonica and such, so that even in winter when a lot of the exotics will have withdrawn into the mulch, there should be some pretty things to look nice at the front.

At the back of this bed there are already two large bamboos (which were trying to make a bid for freedom when we moved here last September) which we have now enclosed with an allegedly root-proof barrier. Let's hope that's not shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted! Also there is a huge phormium which is doing very well.

More later about the wall running through the bed (separating the path off from the rest) that looks like dinosaur teeth...which was rather the point of this post.

More on my day with the gardeners

So along came these two strapping young men and did so much in the garden in one day, the sort of stuff that would have had my husband and I rubbing on the linament and nursing our poor backs for a fortnight!

They planted the Vinca on the banks at the front (oh, had I mentioned Vinca before? Sorry!) then went on to dismantle our old greenhouse (I'm not paying them for that because we asked them if any local person might want it for nothing, and they found a taker, so they are charging them just for the dismantling and erection). Still, we are thrilled that they got that out of the way so now we can build our new one! We are very keen to get that, in fact my husband has been hankering for his own greenhouse for ages now so he can get into seeds and cuttings again like he did when he was a boy. Like me, obviously he has been in a gardening "wilderness" for some years without the opportunity to do it.

We built a lean-to greenhouse on our last property just in time to decide that the noisy neighbours over the fence were making our lives such a misery that we had to move, so he never got the chance to grow anything in it! So far all we have used greenhouses for is overwintering exotic plants in pots, so this spring we are very eager to get it erected, so to speak, and get on with propogating plants like real grown-up gardeners!

They've been and done my planting!

Yesterday the gardeners came and did my planting of (at the risk of being boring) Vinca. I thought they would use ladders to get up on the banks, but no, they chose to just clamber all over them like mountain goats! Oh, the joy of having strong fit young men on the premises! They really gave the grass a scalping first so let's hope I achieve my aim of the ground cover plants taking off more vigorously than the grass.

Periwinkle - The Epic!

Vinca is an ideal ground cover plant for an area where you want weeds to be suppressed and where its natural invasiveness can be kept in check, or where it doesn't matter. It has long stems which creep along the surface of the soil and which seem to have ariel roots, so they root along where they touch, forming a dense mat. There are two main types: Vinca Major and Vinca Minor. As you might guess, the Major variety is the biggest and the most vigorous. Minor has smaller more delicate looking leaves and spreads less readily so is more suitable for a smaller garden.

They all have beautiful pretty blue flowers (sometimes tending towards pink or magenta in certain cultivars) which mainly come in spring, but in some varieties the flowers will come in smaller flushes throughout the warmer seasons. Some give another decent flush of flowers in autumn. It is often cited as a good plant for shade, and here I do not have enough experience of it to comment (but I soon will have!) I have read that it only spreads as far as the shade, and when it hits a sunny spot it slows down its spread and does not thrive. However, I have also read that it may flower better in sun. We shall see!

Three different varieties are to be planted in my garden on three separate banks: one is west facing (but fronted by a row of birch trees) another is east facing (backing on to said trees) and the third is north facing but sheltered. It will be interesting to note in a year's time (or less) where it thrived the most.

I digress - Back to my Gardening History..

The funny thing is, at the time when I had only a flat with no outdoor space, I was very much into my houseplants, and developed what some people would call "green fingers". I had a phase when I became fascinated by cacti. It's one of those things that you can easily have a collection of in a flat, and let's face it they don't really take a lot of looking after. I was quite good at looking after them and have a need to nurture and create. That need has never extended as far as having (or wanting) children, but I have always been good at caring for animals of various species and also plants.

More on Vinca

I know about the invasiveness of vinca (periwinkle) this from experience. Yes, I do have some gardening experience! Before this garden, where of course we believe we have a perfect spot for it, our garden was much smaller, only 45 feet long by 18 wide. We had a shady spot for it in a huge wooden container which we had planted with bamboo, Pseudosasa Japonica. The bamboo and the fence behind it created a shaded area beneath which ferns were thriving.

We planted some Vinca Major Variegata in the big planter at the bottom of the bamboos. OK, it was enclosed and in a container, but it had only been in about six weeks when I got very worried about the fact that it roots wherever the long trailing stems touch. They soon were trailing to the ground beneath the planter and beginning to take hold.
I must confess I pulled them out and trashed them as I didn't want them to take over the small amount of ground we had (apologies to those who have a truly tiny garden, but ours was as small as I would ever like to go!) I also pulled out some of the Vinca Minor that we had been growing at the base of the planter, and when I saw the tangled web of roots I was quite appalled! But in a way I was sad because they have such pretty blue flowers and the variegated stuff looked great trailing over the side of the planter.

So in many ways I am thrilled that we now have the ideal site for this stuff: here on these grassy banks its invasiveness and thick mat of roots will be a boon to fight off weeds (and unwanted grass). Well, that's the theory. Lets see how it works in practice! My gardener (what, you think I do all this by myself?) is coming tomorrow to start planting, lets hope the weather isn't too awful and he can do it as quickly as he claims!

Back to the Vinca

Vinca is an ideal plant for planting on banks which require the soil to be bound together with a thick dense carpet of roots. This prevents soil erosion and stops the bank from collapsing (we sincerely hope!) It is a trailing creeping sort of plant that can easily root wherever it shoots, therefore it's main disadvantage is that it can become invasive. The larger-leaved and more vigorous form, Vinca Major, is particularly thuggish if planted in the wrong place.

Vinca planting

So, to interrupt my life story viz. gardening, I thought I would record what I did today, and yesterday. What I did was unpack 300 vinca plants (periwinkle) which I have bought mail order. Just unpacking them was a right job, so I don't wnvy the gardener who we have hired to actually plant them for us!

We have some quite substantial sloping banks in our front garden which frankly are a bit of a pain in the backside. Currently two of them are grassy and the other is full of birch tree roots and brambles, which I have hacked back. (The brambles, not the tree roots). The previous owner of the house apparently used to actually mow these banks, using a lawnmower on a piece of rope. Now I am one for a relatively easy life, I am a middle-aged woman, and I don't fancy that job at all! Unfortunately neither does my husband! So the solution, we are thinking, is to plant lots and lots of vinca on these banks. It is a fairly rampant ground coverer, and were we to decide we could wait a couple of years for it to grow, we could probably have got away with planting half the number we have bought. However, as we want the vinca to really romp away immediately and starve out the grass, so straight away there is no more mowing or trimming, we have bought lots and lots (it seems like a lot of money!) to have an "instant" effect.

Now I know that you real gardeners out there don't generally approve of instant gardening, but in this instance we really do want to plant it and then forget about it because we have enough to think about around the back garden, without having too much to worry about in the front as well. Hopefully when planted the vinca should look after itself, apart from a bit of a haircut with the hedge trimmer in spring. More on the vinca in my next posting.

More on my (lack of) gardening history...but I'm catching up fast!

Into adulthood, my husband and I lived for fifteen years "above the shop". The shop had no outside space at all, not even a small yard. I yearned to have just a windowbox but even that was not practical as we were afraid of safety issues being right above the pavement, and access would have been difficult from our windows. It was very hard not having any access to a private outdoor space, let alone a garden. Our business was a tropical fish shop and the heat from over 100 tropical aquariums would rise into the flat. On hot summer days our flat would become unbearably hot and we would have to go out for a drive to try and find somewhere to "sit out".

During this time I had no real interest in gardening - how could I since I couldn't actually do any of my own? My mother, then widowed, had moved to a house with what seemed like a big garden, maybe 100 feet long by about 25 wide, and she was very proud of it and showed us round it whenever we visited. Although I adored her garden (but not her obsession with annuals and what I call "hard work" gardening) I still could not muster any real enthusiasm for something I simply could not have myself.

More about my gardening history...or not!

First of all, about me and my garden and experience. I consider myself a novice gardener, although I am in my late forties. Although my mother had a handkerchief-sized garden when I was a kid, which she made the best of, all I remember growing for myself were a lot of mesembryanthemums. I was fascinated at how they open in the sun and close in the shade or at night. In my young adulthood I was a student and did not have a plot of my own nor the interest in cultivating it. Like many youngsters I had other things on my mind!

Welcome to Gardening Notebook

Hello everyone and anyone who is interested in gardening. I have only become a gardener myself in the last three years or so, having lived in places without gardens for many years. Although I have read a lot of books about gardening and plants, and I have some (well, three years) experience of the pastime, I have only recently acquired what to me is a big garden (the whole plot is just under half an acre) and I am raring to go!