Trellis, marigolds and shopping

So the trellis: what's that about? Well, we have been quite alarmed by the strong winds we have experienced in the last week. Although warm enough to work out in a T shirt, it has still been tremendously blustery, and we have realised that the only south facing wall the house has is very much exposed to these south-westerly winds. This is supposed to be the scented area, with plants which should make life more pleasant for us (allergies permitting). That won't happen if they are ripped off the wall by the wind!

So this area is currently surrounded by trellis and a low gate. The trellis is about 6 feet high but that is clearly not high enough, and there is a big gap above the low gate through which the wind really tunnels. We have bought a lot more trellis of two feet high to enclose the area better and plan to close off that gap as well, with something that can be easily removed if we want to go in and out of that gate. Maybe a higher gate? With a peephole in it?

So that's another job for my husband, along with the gazebo that we have yet to erect in that area. The shopping for the trellis was quite successful as we got a pretty good deal at Focus DIY. We need this area to be as sheltered as possible also because we get a lot of nasty smell blowing across on these winds from the local takeaway. Thus the scented plants.

I decided the conservatory didn't have enough seedlings in it so I sowed some more marigolds tonight! By the way, I must have been particularly exhausted when I wrote my last post - what on earth is gerdener's exhaustion? I think I meant gardener. Perhaps I should have called this the garbled gardener!

Gerdeners Exhaustion!

In sensei Titchmarsh-San's books on how to be a gardener and the gardening year, all of which I have found to be invaluable, it does not mention gardener's exhaustion! This I am discovering is a phenomenon which happens when the gardener in question tackles jobs which are beyond her physical strengths and abilities. Yesterday it was fine planting containerised shrubs, but when I decided to pull out some (small) but relatively established Hazels in order to replace them with an evergreen screen, and when I decided at the end of all that to take some heavy sacks of bark chip mulch and attempt to throw them around the border, it was a bit too much for my poor back and constitution. If only I could have gotten my trusty young man gardener friend along to do it, but I am trying to reserve my money for more plants!

Today I have been very much the worse for wear, with a headache for most of the day and a sore back. The problem is, if I don't do this heavy work, I don't know who will, because my husband has a permanently bad back. Fortunately these things are not things which you have to be doing all the time in a garden, but this spring is particularly heavy on hard labor. Well, I managed to pot up a few more seedlings and did an inventory of the shed and all my pest controls and plant foods: it seems we are fine for just about everything except for spring lawn feed. We have enough for 400 square meters but we have 1000 in our lawn so that is a bit inadequate.

Well, that's got them planted!

Today was mostly fine and warm but hideously windy, so not pleasant outside. I decided it was time to plant up my dahlia tubers and cannas and eucomis. It was quite a big job and I now have 25 pots of such things, which hopefully will come on enough to be planted out in May. It will be exciting if they all come leaping into growth.

On the advice from my book by Will Giles about exotics, I have started my cannas off in the heat of the airing cupboard, but the dahlias etc are in the conservatory with everything else. It's a bit chilly in there tonight with the wind and all, so I have put the oil fired radiator on its lowest setting.

So that's all the indoor stuff sorted (well, nearly all my houseplants need repotting, but that will have to wait!) so tomorrow unless the weather is totally foul I will be outside doing some more shrub planting and mulching and all that.

Dahlias on my mind!

I woke up this morning at 5 am. I am now (obviously) sitting at my desk writing this after having made extensive lists of what needs doing in the garden. Right now it is looking pretty daunting, and not helped at all by the weather, which persists in being wet and windy. I don't mind the wet so much for planting etc, I suppose without it I'd be worrying about watering!

This weeks list is:

Start dahlia and cannas in the conservatory.
Start planting gladioli outside
Move my small fatsia and Viburnum Opulus Compactum because they have been planted too close together.
Dig up about 4 hazels and move them.
Move self-seeded hollyhocks from bed by the house.
Weed if necessary or possible
Finish building gazebo base if weather and husband permit.
Look out for more spring pruning that needs doing.
Look after all seedlings
Put more mulch on the back border around newly planted shrubs.

It doesn't look too bad when you look at it like that does it? As long as I try to do the jobs like this in bite sized chunks it is OK, but it's when I lay awake at night trying to "do it all at once" that I get crazy with it.

Not much gardening

Not much gardening was done today. Well. this morning I sowed some more seeds. Tomatoes, Chilean Glory Vine, Canary Creeper, Mesymbreanthemum, Alyssum, Agastache. I had to go out this afternoon to an Egyptian drumming and bellydance workshop, so that interrupted my gardening. Shame because the weather was really not bad at all today, although as I write at about 5pm it has just started to rain. Wouldn't have been good for the garden painting jobs then, as the paint wouldn't have had the chance to dry. Doesn't look like there is going to be a totally fine day for at least another week though. The conservatory looks like Kew at the moment as a consquence...roll on the completed and painted greenhouse! Mind you, I really enjoyed the workshop, it's good to get yourself totally away from it once in a while and do something utterly different.

More Pricking Out

So I have now pricked out some more seedlings, this time the green Nicotiana. Having resigned ourselves to rain for the next week at least, we had to bite the bullet and erect the full eight feet long plant stand in the conservatory for them. Now I can really get on with sowing some more seeds and having the plants we need for the summer. I am particularly concerned about getting our Dahlias and other bulbs, corms and rhizomes started. Some say March, others April for planting. If I have the facilities in the conservatory to do what I like then at least I can just get on with it now, this spring is a bit of a devil, having been so cold for so long, and now wet - that's just typical as it's my first season with a big garden to work!

Now the gardener is up against the rain!

Now it looks like it is going to rain for at least a week. As long as it is mild, I don't mind too much. I don't particularly relish glomping around in my waterproofs but I quite enjoy planting in the rain when I am appropriately dressed.

The big problem about it is the painting work that must be done on the greenhouse, which can't be done because of the wet. This is holding up the seed planting and potting on (well, it won't be because I will carry on sowing seeds in the conservatory, but space is going to get a bit ridiculous and we have no chance of having anyone over to dinner because the conservatory is also supposed to be the dining room! Ho hum.

Still, it's better than that bitter cold, and I have plenty of hardy plants to get in the ground, so it's not as if I will be idle just because it's raining. It's just all the carry on coming in and going out, the putting on and off of the waterproof trousers (that don't fit very well without braces!) and coat, and shoes, and hat, and all that, that is a pain. And the mud in the conservatory. If only we had a separate mud room.

We've been to the garden centre

Wow! That was fun. We had to go to B&Q first for some DIY bits and pieces, then on to Nottcutts in Norwich. We had a nice lunch there and then set to buying plants like loonies. Well, OK, perhaps not quite, but it feels quite exciting to actually set off and buy some of the things I have been planning for what seems like the long winter months.

Bought a twisted hazel, Corylus Contorta, ok it's in catkin now so nearing the end of its season, but it will be nice for next winter and it looks good now. Some hardy geraniums, which I fancy very much for color and spreading habit in the border, and if you give them a good old snip after flowering they often come back and flower again a month or two later. Some other shrubs and perennials also found their way into my basket, not to mention yet more seeds. Better get sowing!

Gardening Shopping

So, it's raining today - which is great in many ways because it means I don't have to water 300 Vinca Minor and Vinca Major. We are going shopping today for more paint for the famous red (soon to be green, I hope) greenhouse, and some more DIY bits and pieces. There is a very high step now going into the greenhouse and Ray wants to build some sort of a ramp leading into it for the wheelbarrow or cart.

Also I think I might be on a plant buying spree, if only the garden centres have improved their stock. I am getting tired of seeing winter flowering shrubs and spring bulbs in the shops - but I guess it's not yet the time for summer bedding.

The weather just held out

Yes, it just held out long enough for painting the greenhouse, well, primer-ing it anyway. I had hoped that we would be able to start getting the topcoat on today but these things are always more fiddly than you think, and we decided to try and do a decent job on the primer rather than rushing it. It was good stuff, I have to say. The surface feels more like wood than metal now for re-coating, so the main paint should go on much more easily.

The weather was great - well, sunny and just warm enough for the paint (mustn't be used at lower than five degrees you see). But by 3.30 pm the wind was getting up and getting much more chilly and I was getting worried that it was getting too cold to use the paint. Mind you we pressed on, as the thermometer told us it was still nine degrees (which I find a little hard to believe) and we got the job finished. Well, now for another warm-ish not raining day to do the topcoat, and then we are on to glazing the greenhouse and having somewhere to put the exotic plants and the seedlings at last!

Has Spring arrived?

Today was the first sunny day where the temperature got above five degrees in ages. At last, we leapt out and started painting the greenhouse. You may remember that the greenhouse shows up much more than we expected. Because the old one was hidden behind the shed, we didn't think about it being so much smaller than the new one, and having erected the framework we were dismayed to see this expanse of gleaming alumnium drawing the eye at the bottom of the garden. If only we had opted for the green powder-coated version!

Anyway, we got out there and painted it in Hammerite Special Metals Primer while the weather was right. It is a rather sort of deep rusty maroon color which makes the end of the garden look a bit like an industrial estate, but it's only temporary - well, we hope so. Now the end of March approaches we surely can hope for another decent day soon when we can overpaint it with the green topcoat? Already the red (glassless, useless) greenhouse at least looks better and less conspicuous than the silvery one did.

Planting to Screen Garden Eyesores

Actually I am not letting myself get despondent at the task of all this planting. I did a lot more today. It turns out the neighbour at the back of us has decided to put his kiddies' swings right in our line of sight behind our big Scots Pine. It's one of the few areas at the back of the garden where you can see through, because the rest of it is covered by his leylandii hedge. And where does he choose to put the pig-ugly (sorry to pigs) swings? Right there, where we can see round the tree right at them. They are bright silver and red and look like a total eyesore, and (sorry children everywhere) will look (and sound) even worse when they have kids on them!

In a way it was good that he erected this today, just as we were planting along the back fence, because at least we could see exactly what the eyesore now is that we have to cover. It's amazing,we put two biggish Fatsia Japonica either side of the tree and some other strategically-placed shrubs, and now from the conservatory we can't see the swings at all. The problem at the moment is the view from the (not yet built) gazebo, but we might make an island bed with bamboo in it half way down the garden in order to screen that off. At the moment we seem to spend our lives trying to screen off neighbours and eyesores, which gives a bad impression of the place. Actually it is a very beautiful garden, or it sure will be, but the strategic placing of certain shrubs and trees will make all the difference so that we feel more privacy and beauty around us.

Don't let the bedding drive you down!

I did a bit more planting. Not bedding really, big shrubs and things like that. These beds are so huge though, it looks like nothing. My God there is such a lot to do all at once, it is ridiculous. And now my elbow is playing up again, and I don't know a good physio here. Grrr.

Still, nil desperandum. Tomorrow's another day and what's the betting it will be too wet or too cold to paint the greenhouse green??

Sowing Seeds the Daft Way!

Did I mention that when we sowed our first batch of seeds in the seven-trayed heated windowsill propogator in the conservatory, the labels all washed off? Yes, how utterly intelligent it was of us to write on the plastic labels with ordinary felt tip pen! Mind you, that's exactly what the gas engineer did with the emergency number written by the LPG canisters outside, but that's just our gas engineer for you, isn't it?

We had to guess what we had sown, but that was made easier as we had sown three trays of Verbena Bonariensis and two of Nicotiana, and the hollyhocks came up very quickly, so that just left the Physalis..which have propogated beautifully. It will look good if they turn out to be all hollyhocks, but I think I can recognise the foliage now for what it is! So all was by no means lost. Pricking out time again!

Gardening's hard when spring won't come

The gardener's assistant came again this morning to finish off the lawn edging for the borders. He did that in double quick time but it is still a bit proud so he'll have to come back. I was pushed to find him something else to do in this cold weather. How ridiculous is that, when there are millions of jobs to do as soon as the weather gets a little bit warmer? Ended up asking him to dig a circle of grass out around all four of our fruit trees and mulch it with manure. They were planted by the previous owners direct into the grass, and that's all wrong isn't it? They need a bit of mulched ground around them where they are not getting competition from grass and weeds. So he did that, and then went.

What happened to Spring?

Well, we seem to be getting nowhere fast. I've bought Alan Titchmarsh's latest tome about The Gardening Year and he says it's not a nag, just a reminder of what to do when. Well, Alan, I think it's safe to say we are falling at the first fence here as March is total chaos! The greenhouse isn't built yet, which is a bit of a desperate situation as it means the conservatory is now the greenhouse which is really quite warm and everything in it thinks summer's here with a bang, and also we no longer have a dining room because it's greenhouse. Neither is the gazebo built yet, but no matter about that till summer. (Except once the gazebo is built we can have the bed dug around it to put the scented garden).

The conservatory is full of seedlings and overwintering bananas etc, lord knows where we will find the space to start off all our dahlias and cannas in tubs, the weather is still winter cold. Yes I know it's common sense and March doesn't have to mean March, it just means the start of the reasonably mild weather. But right now winter has dug its heels in and is here to stay!

Weed Proof Membrane or Sheet Mulch

I refer of course to weed-proof membrane, that black polypropylene-type stuff that I consider to be very ugly indeed. We have some of it in the front garden which the previous owners put down but it is under some leylandii hedge trees (which surely should suppress weeds fairly adequately by themselves?) As this is behind a very low retaining wall like a raised bed, it is tricky to get a more decorative mulch on top of that which won't just fall off all over the path alongside and below it. I don't like it.

Nevertheless the gardener has tried hard to persuade me to have it in my new borders. He reckons that these are so large that weeding them will be like painting the Forth Bridge. My objection is that it will still need bark chippings all over the top of it to make it look nice, and it always ends up peeping out somewhere and looking pants. Also, we have sandy soil that needs enrichment, and we have five compost bins and three plus leafmould bins on the go. Next autumn/spring when I want to be throwing down more mulch and protecting plants, and enriching the soil again in spring, where on earth will I put all that organic matter if I have this impenetrable barrier to get through?

I know weeding will be a pain, but surely the two to three inch bark chipping mulch, along with the manure and compost mulch beneath, will have some weed-suppressant effect? We'll see...

Containerized bamboo and the sheet mulch issue

The gardener put lawn edging all around the new borders he has dug for us and filled up the big wooden container we have built for bamboo. He used old sods of earth from the border digging with some old stones beneath for drainage. The good compost and manure will comprise the top 15 inches or so for the bamboo to actually grow in. It will start out about thirty inches off the ground so it will be a tall barrier from the very start! Hoperfully this will help screen off the nasty smells from next door.

He has tried to persuade me to have sheet mulch beneath my new borders to avoid having too much weeding. I am a bit nervous of the stuff but I am assured I would prefer it to weeding. We shall see - more on this later.

The gardener returns

Eight o' clock yesterday morning the gardener turned up on the doorstep all ready to start - heavens, I was only just ripe from the crumpled sheets myself! He was actually ready to finish off the work for me, but I hadn't expected him so it took ages for me to get my brain in gear and remember all the things I meant to say to him and ask him to do. Then we ended up deep in discussion about our plans for the garden, and that took up a lot of time. To be honest the whole day was disrupted but really I can't complain as he did some really good things.

It sounds awfully grand to say I have a gardener, because I don't. I have a guy who has come to do a certain few heavy jobs for me, and no doubt it will be happening again, but financial constraints mean that I will have to do most of the work myself. The good thing is that the gardener is such a nice chap and we have also met and like his wife, so it looks like we will have gained a couple of friends.

Re-planting my bulbs

So on Sunday it was not too bad, the weather I mean. Although they said it would be bitterly cold, once you get out there in your padded shirt and thermals - and my wonderful waterproof trousers which mean I can kneel anywhere I want without fear of getting soggy knees, it was OK. I had the sun on my back most of the time as well. I feel a bit guilty because up north where I come from they have been having really bad snow. Mind you I suppose it's their turn, we had it last week and they were largely ok.

Anyway, I digress. I did actually manage to re-plant my spring bulbs. It's quite hard to plant them "in the green", big daffs and such, because they have so much strappy foliage on them it's not like just planting bulbs when they are only bulbs. They have roots, and have to be planted pretty deep. I couldn't avoid them still showing a bit of yellow or even white blanched foliage where they had been pulled out of the ground before, and they look a bit floppy and ramshackle now, not like bulbs normally do, all straight and military, sticking up. Well, let's see if they flower OK. There will be quite a mishmash of different bulbs because I don't know what it was exactly I was planting. I hope it will look artful and clever, not just a mess. I suppose that's part of the excitement of gardening, waiting to see what comes up.

The latest progress...or not

Well, it was an interesting weekend. It was forecast very cold, with the rest of the country from north of us upwards having heavy snow. Well on Saturday it was really cold and I was so wiped out that I could barely stagger around the garden centre, after all the fun on Friday preparing the flowerbeds with my gardener.

So Saturday was a write-off. I really do have trouble with my energy levels, mind you I think the gardeners were amazed at how gung-ho and keen I am to get down and dirty with my gardening, for a middle-aged woman!

Screening the Greenhouse?

Hmmm...the weather is quite inclement at the moment for gardening. It's going to be a cold weekend and when it's not cold at the moment it seems to be forecast wet. This is causing us no end of trouble with our new plan of painting the greenhouse before it is glazed. By the time the weather is fine and warm enough to use this metal paint on the aluminium greenhouse, it will be so warm we won't need the darn thing anyway, and the conservatory will be so full of totally mollycoddled seedlings and little plants we won't know where to turn!

Plan B, or is it E, M Y or Z? Plant a screen in front of the greenhouse so it can't be seen. We seem to spend our lives trying to think of suitable screening plants for one thing or another. Current ideas are a Eucalyptus, but is it hardy and evergreen enough? Or a Ginko, but is it evergreen? Or yet more trellis , with climbers - but so few interesting climbers that like full sun are evergreen and hardy. Ivy will put up with just about anything, but its a slow starter. I like Solanum Crispum Glasnevin, we used to have one at our old place, it's not fully evergreen in cold winds but it is pretty tough and very pretty and prolific in flower. Its stems are considerable so even without leaves there's plenty there until the spring prune, of course.

Other possibilities are Lonicera Japonica Aureoreticulata and Lonicera Alseumoides which are allegedly evergreen. But aren't Honeysuckles sort of messy and leggy and get top-heavy? And am I bothered? Don't know, need to do yet more study on this subject. And what's more, like I don't have enough planting to do!! Spring is all work this year!

How many bags of chipped bark can one woman spread?

Tonight I am quite exhausted having helped my gardener to distribute compost, manure and chipped bark all over my two new beds. Wow, was it hard work! The weather was largely kind to us, with the odd light shower but not too cold. We finished up putting plastic lawn edging along the edges, but that is no picnic, especially when you are trying to go over big tree roots.

Hopefully there won't be so many days in the garden which are such hard work, because this sort of thing really does feel like hard labour. And now they are saying it's going cold again and snowy, grrr! Mind you they say we won't get the weather too bad here and it will be a short cold snap. Frustrating though because I've got all those bulbs to replant... Well, these things are here to try us.

Lifting Spring Bulbs now??

Well you'll never guess what I did yesterday - I lifted my spring bulbs just before they are due to flower. I know it sounds crazy but today I have a man coming in to spread muck and mulch all over my borders, and one of the borders was partially planted, and all these bulbs and small shrubs and self-seeded foxgloves were in the wrong place! I figured it best to lift them all, pop them temporarily into pots, then plant them all again in the right place as soon as the beds have been prepared. This is preferable to them being trampled or squashed by the mulch. So today I am muckspreading and mulching. Wish me luck!

This time of year for gardening...

The trouble with this time of year for gardening is that it is either too cold or too wet. Rain is predicted for at least the next few days. The good news with that is that it is warmer in the rain, so some of my planting could get done. The bad news is that of course I will have to paint the greenhouse before we can glaze it and have it going, so it's either too wet to paint or too cold to use the paint.

They are saying Saturday might be fine, so that is all very well but on that day we would have to be actually putting the rest of the glazing bars in. No way could we get it finished, cleaned, primed and painted in one day before the rain comes back. It looks like the conservatory is going to be in use as a greenhouse for a while yet, so we can't really have many dinner parties as the conservatory is also the dining room!

The colour of the greenhouse

Did I mention that the aluminium greenhouse glints like a beacon in the evening sun? I adore the way the sun shines over the house into the back garden, making the bark on the scots pine glow a pinky-orange, and the beech leaves in autumn look quite spectacular. I don't want that view to be spoiled by a bright silver coloured greenhouse which shines so brightly it looks as if it has landed from another planet!

If only we had been able to sport the extra, well, almost £300, to have a green one. It didn't seem that important at the time but now I see how a green one is not just for snob value. Mind you, I'm not sure if in the long run it would be worth £300. To argue with myself, though, it is not only green you get for that money but powder-coated green. Anyhow, now I have decided that - just to add to all the jobs we have to do this spring, I am going to paint it green! Of course before you paint you have to clean and prime, but hopefully it won't be too bad a job. We are so keen to get it glazed and up and running though, with all the seedlings and plants in the conservatory at the moment! There's never enough hours in the gardeners day, eh?

The Greenhouse is getting nowhere!

The sun is shining this afternoon and by rights we should be working on the greenhouse again, but we are having the kitchen torn apart for a new hob and it has been so distracting today that absolutely nothing has happened! Now we will have to put all our greenhouse bits back in the garden sheds - and we did nothing with them! They say it will be raining by tomorrow. Grrrr!

The Greenhouse is Partly Up!

Over the weekend we had the chance to go out in the garden (once the frost had disappeared) and start erecting the greenhouse. So far we have the frame up but not the roof glazing bars or any glazing. It wasn't so awful an experience so far, despite a few glitches, which fortunately we realised pretty soon so we didn't have any panels completely constructed the wrong way round, thank God. Mind you the instructions were fairly good and you wonder how do these guys think these constructions up?

The only thing is it is very big -8 feet by 12 feet - it seems well more than double the size of the old 8 by 6 one. It's aluminium and shines at the moment very brightly in the evening sun. So next thing it will be getting a feature or plant to screen the greenhouse as it is a bit imposing, to say the least!

Bought the mulch

Well, it hasn't snowed again yet but they say it won't get mild and wet again until next Tuesday. Hope the vinca copes with the freezing conditions. It looks fine at the moment and tough as a boot. Went to the garden centre today and put our money down on the bark chip mulch and manure for the new beds. Hopefully it will all go like clockwork next Friday when it is delivered, all 60 or so bags of it, in a trailer coming up our driveway, and hope the gardeners are feeling nice and strong to help the delivery man with it all.

The gardener seems baffled at my ideas of using bark or woodchip as mulch and would very much like me to use landscape fabric, but although I have wavered back and forth on the subject I am back with my original belief that a more organic mulch will be better in the long run and cause me less frustration than that dreadful plastic-y stuff which we have elsewhere in the garden and I hate. Surely ground cover planting and bark mulch is better than all that stuff peeking out and getting in the way when you try to plant things?

More frost and snow to come!

This morning, although the snow had begun to melt quite nicely yesterday afternoon in the sunshine, there was what they call an extensive hard frost. They say it was about -5 last night, which is darn cold (please excuse me, any of you from Siberia or even Canada or the USA, but for the UK this is quite bad!

I just hope that some of the plants that I have blithely left outside in the assumption that the frosts around here aren't so bad, will not have succumbed to the icy conditions. It's all very well this exotic and tropical gardening but if you don't have the chance to wrap them all up warm then a hard winter can catch you unawares. We have fleeced and mulched and placed against warm walls and all that, so hopefully there won't be too many casualties, it will be interesting (and I hope not too negative!) to find out.

Sowing Seeds - A Mix Up!

Oh dear, you know I said we have sowed some seeds in a heated propogator in the conservatory? Well, we wrote on those plastic label things in ordinary felt tip pen! How stupid is that! No prizes for guessing that all the plant names have just run off, so we have no idea which of seven varieties things are. And one lot have shot up and produced little seedlings at breakneck speed. We have had to re-label things from memory and process of elimination. Hmmm...I expect we might be in for some surprises!

In the Absence of a Greenhouse...

As the gardener has dismantled our old greenhouse and the snow has prevented us from getting outside and erecting the new one, we have had to start our sowing in the conservatory. As we wouldn't have electricity in the greenhouse anyway as it will be too far away from the house and garage, the heated propogators will have to live in the house anyway.

We have already sown Malva (Magic Hollyhock), Nicotiana (the big white one) and Verbena Bonariensis, and some other seeds. I understand the latter is a prolific self-seeder so I might regret putting lots of it in this year, but I hope it flowers for us this year as I need it to lighten up some of my planting schemes.

The exotic bed will be so much red, orange and yellow, and needs plenty of blue to offset that, and also the scented bed will be mainly white, so violet blues and an occasional splash of pink or orange will look good there in my opinion. Verbena dotted about seems to fit the bill for all that. I'm a total beginner to growing from seed but Ray my husband has done it before but many years ago. He is very excited at the prospect of raising his own baby plants again!

Telephone Gardening! Mulch.

So while the snow was on the ground (thankfully it has been thawing a bit throughout the day so my paths are passable, but it's going cold and icy again tonight), I decided to let my fingers do the walking and get on the telephone concerning - gardening! I phoned round various local garden centres to try and get myself the best deal on several sacks of bark mulch and manure to be delivered, hopefully next week if the weather picks up.

It was quite surprising. At first I rang a proper bark mulch company who would deliver it to me in bulk, but it is inconvenient for it to come in a huge pile for me as our driveway is not that suitable - it is a bit narrow and very sloping. We have been in the position before when a tipper truck full of gravel was landed on our old driveway unexpectedly (well, at an earlier day and time than we expected it - it wasn't a neighbour with a grudge, you understand!) and it's a pain to have to drop everything and get the shovels out. So in many ways I thought it would be more suitable in bags, but I expected it to be more prohibitively expensive.

In the end the very Garden Centre I expected would be the most expensive turned out to be the least. There you go, it pays to shop around! Now I've got to decide if there is any chance of us distributing all these bags around the garden or if I really do have to hire my friendly local gardeners to do the job. Perhaps it would be wisest to use their backs for this job, as we will have enough on with the construction of the greenhouse and gazebo. Hmmmmm... Money or time, an aching back and money left for a meal or two out, or a comfy back and gruel for a week? The weak gardener's dilemma!

White out Snow

Well, yesterday was a horrendous day for snow here, and this morning the ground is very crisp and scary. Our driveway slopes quite a lot and I diligently gritted it yesterday before it froze, but I still don't fancy walking (or driving) down it right now! It's a bit worrying for the deliveries we are expecting today. Hope the ubiquitous Vinca is coping OK under a nice snuggly blanket of snow! The good news is that it looks beautiful and I am feeding the birds - the blackbirds form quite a queue outside the patio doors in the morning for apples, sultanas and fat.

The bad news (apart from the difficulty getting about) is the way it weighs down your evergreen shrubs and trees. I have been out and "biffed" the snow of some of them which were looking particularly bowed and potentially broken. I have read about this from some gardening writers, then some others have said that they can't be bothered. Well I'll see how much damage there is when it thaws. I hope I have not lost anything to the cold as I am trying to overwinter some plants like canna and ginger outside, wrapped up with straw and fleece, by a south-facing wall with a radiator on the other side. Well, spring shouldn't be long now so we will soon see what survives.