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~ A Life in Wellies

wellywoman

Tag Archives: garden pond

A change is as good as a move …

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by wellywoman in autumn, Cut Flowers, In the Garden

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

cut flower garden, cut flower patch, garden desing, garden pond, head torch, raised beds

Syringa meyeri 'Josee'

Syringa meyeri ‘Josee’

Well maybe that’s going a bit far but a bit of a garden revamp has certainly reignited my interest in my own back garden. This time last year both Wellyman and I were excited about the prospect of moving house but when we decided to put that on hold I pretty much lost my gardening mojo. I had entered into gardening limbo. As the summer progressed it got worse. I was still growing for work but inside my heart wasn’t in it. I spent a lot of time wracking my brain as to how to marry the situation with my need for a change. I didn’t want to spend much money and didn’t have the inclination to rip out everything I had planted over the last 8 years and start again. The idea of creating a cutting garden had been at the back of my mind for a while. A space packed with shrubs, bulbs and herbaceous perennials which would supplement the annuals from the cut flower patch. A place where everything could be picked for a vase. I’d always planned for it to be in another garden, somewhere a little bigger, where I could start from scratch. I hummed and hawed over whether it would be worth trying it here and if I actually had the space to do it. After 7 years of being in place the raised beds needed a few repairs anyway and the pond no longer worked where it was. So a few weekends ago we bit the bullet. Wellyman cleverly rejigged the raised bed configuration. By removing a few oak boards we incorporated a path into the beds and reusing the boards meant we didn’t need to spend any money.

The next job was to move the pond. I say pond, it’s more of a puddle to be honest, one of those preformed liners. It’s initial spot was fine, but then the greenhouse came along which made access to the pond tricky. Cleaning out pond weed required Wellyman (his longer arms were needed) to perform a yoga-like balancing act. Being tucked away meant not only did it not get cleaned as frequently as it should have but we also didn’t get to appreciate it. We did consider removing it completely, to put the space to better use, but we thought we’d at least try it out in its new location and then decide. Wellyman decanted two-thirds of the water into trugs and we gingerly lifted it out of the ground. Then two little eyes appeared. There was a frog staring back at us looking a little perturbed by the disturbance and us rudely waking him up on a Sunday morning. Well, what could we do? The decision was made for us, we could hardly make him/her homeless, so the pond is to stay, albeit in a new, more accessible spot.

Plants were divided and some went to the compost heap making way for others which had been sitting in pots waiting for a new home. Out have come grasses, a helenium, and some sedums, in has gone a small, repeat flowering lilac, a Viburnum opulus and some hesperantha.

Garden revamp

Garden revamp

With time soil had made its way on to the gravel paths, so much so that I’ve had as many plants sprouting in the paths as in the raised beds this summer. As everything was getting an overhaul the gravel was moved on to plastic sheets whilst the weed membrane was swept. We made a fantastic muddy mess by washing the gravel to remove any soil and plant material before putting it all back on top of the membrane.

Working outside at this time of year brings its problems. For a couple of weeks after the clocks change, the shorter days take me by surprise. You come back after a break for lunch and realise there’s so much still to do but that daylight is already slipping away. I seem to have spent quite a bit of time in recent weeks scrabbling around in the dark with a torch perched precariously whilst bulb planting, tidying out the greenhouse or potting up plants. I think a head torch might be making it to the top of my Christmas list this year.

The raised beds in spring

The raised beds in spring

The other problem is mud. It’s impossible to do anything in the garden without creating a mess and the damp weather means nothing dries out. You start this kind of work with the best intentions taking wellies off every time you come indoors but when the phone rings and you’re trying to do the welly removal dance at speed or you’ve forgotten something for the umpteenth time it’s all becomes too much of a faff. The wellies remain on and the floor starts to resemble the mud splattered patio. Then there’s the clothes. It was hard to tell if there were gloves under the hand-shaped clumps of mud which Wellyman left by the back door.

I didn’t think a patio caked in mud was what the magazine editor and photographer would be looking for to accompany shots of spring bulb planting. I’d scrubbed and scrubbed with a brush but it didn’t seem to make the flagstones look any cleaner. Day after day of thick fog and moisture saturating every surface didn’t help. I was contemplating hiring a pressure washer at one point, until I woke one morning to the sound of rain pelting the roof and more importantly the patio. Every cloud has a silver lining.

You can’t call what we did a garden redesign but I think it’s enough to fire my imagination for another couple of years. It’ll give me the opportunity to grow new plants, to experiment in the garden and in the vase, and to excite me as to how elements of the garden will change through the seasons. And, perhaps most importantly for now, there’ll be lots of lists and scribblings this winter as I scour the plant and seed catalogues.

Have you got any plans, grand or small, for your garden this autumn/winter?

 

Garden Centre Splurge

23 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by wellywoman in Fruit, In the Garden, Ponds

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Discovery Apple, Espaliered apple, garden pond, mycchorizal fungi, Puddle Plants

Espalier Apple Tree

Our new apple tree

Last weekend must have been the weekend for impulse buying for the garden. Both Jo at The Good Life and Caro at Urban Veg Patch succumbed to the charms of their local garden centre and they weren’t alone. I only popped in to have a look at climbing plants and came out with 2 pots of cottage pinks, a pond liner and an espaliered apple tree. Oh dear, where did my willpower go?

We had been thinking about a pond and an apple tree for a while but had procrastinated and managed to find plenty of reasons not to buy them; we should be saving up, too many bills to pay, how long are we going to stay in this house, all those sorts of things. Then I read a post at The Garden Smallholder by Karen, about her own pond and it got me thinking all over again. I started eyeing up potential spots, we don’t have much room so it would really depend on whether we could get the right size liner and that they weren’t too expensive. So I mentioned it to Wellyman and he said he was keen too. In the case of the apple, well we had the perfect spot for an espalier but thought we had left it too late to find one.

Scroll forward several days to the garden centre. We headed straight for the aquatic section where there was a liner that looked about the right size. Not ones to be totally impulsive, we took the measurments and decided we’d check first at home that it would fit without looking ridiculous and then maybe pop back on Sunday.

We then found the climbers and I had pretty much decided to go for a Trachelospermum jasminoides to go by our front door when I got distracted by some cottage pinks, which I love. There were really lovely specimens with plenty of cuttings potential and then Wellyman, who had wandered off somewhere reappeared declaring he had found the perfect apple tree and it was a good price. He was right, it was exactly the right size for it’s potential home, a two tiered Discovery apple. There followed much humming and hawing, the purchase of the cottage pinks and a trip home to do said measurements. An hour later we were back at the garden centre handing over the credit card. Ouch!

Garden Pond

The pond looking a little bare at the moment

So we’re now the proud owners of a pond and an apple tree. The bank balance has taken a bit of a hit. There are of course all the other costs involved, pond plants, stones for around the edge, plants for around the edge of the pond to give it that, well pondy feel. As for the apple, there are posts and hooks and wire and mycchorizal fungi. We spent another hour or so at the garden centre yesterday buying all that stuff. Even so, I’m sure we’ll get a huge amount of pleasure from both. I’m hoping we’ll attract some frogs, I could do with some help on the slug front and I’m looking forward to the blossom on the apple tree and then eating our own fruit in the autumn. Both will add different elements to the garden and I’ll have to learn how to prune an espalier properly, which is good because I like a new challenge.

Hopefully, with a dry weekend Wellyman should get the posts and wires in place for the apple so we can get rid of the temporary supports and then I need to hit the books to find some plants to put around the pond so it doesn’t look so bare. Although I don’t like makeover, instant gardens I never like the stage of a garden where you’re waiting for everything to fill out and there’s just a bit too much soil on display. It’s for this reason I tend to buy to many plants and then realise that it doesn’t actually take them too long to fill a space. So I will have to be more restrained this time.

This morning I made a small boggy area around the pond, digging out some soil and placing some black liner in the hole. I made sure there were plenty of holes in the liner and added some grit to the bottom, so that the soil doesn’t clog up the holes and then backfilled and planted up some Iris sibirica and a couple of ragged robin plants, both of which like damp soil. Hopefully it won’t be long before we’ve attracted some wildlife.

I’d just like to give a quick mention to Puddle Plants. One of the things that had put me off about establishing our own pond in the past had been the price of pond plants. The typical cost at our local garden centres was £6 a plant but at Puddle Plants they are around £2 to £3 and although there is a delivery charge they still worked out cheaper. They are based in Suffolk and have a great website and from ordering on Monday I had the plants by Thursday, so I would definitely recommend them.

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My latest book – The Crafted Garden

My latest book - The Crafted Garden

My latest book - The Crafted Garden

My Book – The Cut Flower Patch

My Book - The Cut Flower Patch. Available to buy from the RHS online bookshop.

The Cut Flower Patch – Garden Media Guild Practical Book 2014

The Cut Flower Patch - Garden Media Guild Practical Book 2014
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