Meanwhile, out the back...

(the image just made me laugh!)

After tidying up a bit in the front garden, I thought I'd hop round the back as it's a mess out there too ~ I hope I'm not making you dizzy with all this jumping back and forth 😁

I started in the kitchen courtyard area.  The tubs and planters weren't too bad, to be fair, but still had their fair share of weeds.

The large "barrel" planter has a mock orange in it, which I thought hadn't made it through the winter.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did actually have some little green shoots, so I just trimmed off the dead pieces.  The only other things in there are a couple of ornamental dandelions ~ one has pink flowers (taraxacum pseudoroseum) and the other is white (taraxacum albidum) ~ and one lonely little primrose (Scentsation Rhubarb and Custard) that just keeps soldiering on, despite all its comrades having perished a while back 😄

As you can probably tell, the plant in the large pot is an elder (sambucus nigra Black Lace).  It survived the winter quite happily in its pot, but I thought it best to replant it into a larger one.  My plan is to put it into a large tub at some point, probably on the new patio in the front garden, and keep it trimmed to a maneageable size.  The other pot has a dahlia tuber in it which didn't feel soggy when I gave it a gentle squeeze, so I've just left it to its own devices 😏

Again, the other side of the courtyard area didn't look bad really despite the ravages of last winter.

I've no idea what kind they are, but the empty planter has had a number of fungi popping up in it.  I suspect they may be from the bark chippings I had topped the planter off with.

It didn't take me too long to tidy up the tubs.  The standard redcurrant just needed to be staked upright again ~ I thought it better to just leave it leaning at a jaunty angle until the high winds had calmed down a tad 😉  The bay tree seems happy in its large pot but the winter winds really scorched its leaves.  I decided to cut it right back and let the fresh green leaves see the light of day.  I'm going to try to remember to give it a fleece jacket before this next winter sets in to see if that makes any difference to how it stands up to the winds.

 I think I may have shown you this "mystery" plant before.  It was given to me by a friend who is involved with the Orkney Food Bank.  When they moved to different premises the plant became rather surplus to requirements, so ever the sucker for a hard-luck-story-houseplant I took it in.  Now, it was given to me as a "houseplant" although no one seemed to know what it actually is ~ and I'm still none-the-wiser!  I temporarily put it outside last year.....and it ended up being out there all winter 😯  I kept saying to myself that I really ought to find it a space in the house, or even in the greenhouse, but just never got round to it.  However, it's stint outside in the cold winter weather (including snow!) doesn't seem to have done it any harm whatsoever.  

I kept thinking that I'd look out the kitchen window one morning and see that it had finally succumbed, but it stayed looking pretty much the same for the whole winter!  Perhaps it's some kind of outdoor plant rather than a houseplant ~ who knows?  I thought it deserved to be repotted into a larger container and as it seems quite happy living on the lower shelf of the potting bench, I put it back there.  It will be interesting to see how it progresses ~ I'll keep you informed 😉

Little words of wisdom

 

Sidetracked...

image from Magnific.com

In my last garden post, we had come to a bit of a standstill with re-making the wildlife area whilst Adrian was constructing the raised bed(s).  I couldn't really do anything to help him, so I drew a deep breath and veered off to make a start on tackling all the other weedy areas in the front garden 😳 

As you know, we've decided to considerably scale back the kitchen garden and over the coming months all the beds in the front will be dismantled ~ more on that in future posts 😉

One thing we do still want to grow is at least some potatoes, as homegrown ones are just so much tastier than shop-bought ones!  I was very late in planting out my chitted seed potatoes this year, and confess that I did wonder if they would actually grow once I'd got them in the ground.  I'm pleased to report that every single one has sent up a fine head of leaves so hopefully we'll have another good crop of potatoes again later this year 😊  I'm trying a different variety this time: Caledonian Rose.  Since this photo was taken, I have plonked a good layer of soil over the plants ~ as usual, I'm pretty behind with photo-sharing 😏

I'm only growing potatoes this year as we've got such a lot of work to get done in the garden, so the raised beds have come in useful as holding beds for the plants I've kept for re-planting in due course.  This bed had potatoes in it last year and I obviously didn't get all the teeny-tiny spuds removed, hence them sprouting away quite happily!

If the bed had been empty I would probably have left them to grown on, but I had already moved in some of the plants which had been in the beds where the new patio now is.  The potatoes were starting to smother the poor little buggers, so out they had to come I'm afraid. 

I was particularly pleased to see these dahlias coming through, as I thought the winter would probably kill them off.  I had them in pots last year and was just too lazy to store them "properly" over winter, so into the raised bed they went 😄  I suspect the fact that they were planted in a raised bed probably helped with drainage, and thus stopped their tubers getting too wet and rotting away.

This was the view I had through to the Hoy Hills whilst I was working 😍

These plants were what I decided to keep from the old pond area.  Some of the tiger lilies are currently flowering, so this part of the garden smells lovely ~ perhaps that's why next-door's cat seems to like it over here so much 😄

You may recall that this bed had large pots of strawberries in it.  Luckily it was a pretty straightforward task to tidy up the plants, disposing of the handful that had died, and move the pots round to the back garden.  They are in a temporary area at the moment until we work our way round to re-jigging the back garden at some point 😱  This will be the first of the kitchen garden beds to be re-purposed as part of the new pond area ~ all will become clear as the work out there continues, I promise 😏

I couldn't summon up the energy to tackle the garden borders, so compromised by tidying this bed over on the other side of the garden instead.  It looked worse than it actually was, to be fair, and didn't really take too long.  You'll have to take my word for it, though, as I forgot to take a photo when I'd finished 😄

I fairly often come across frogs on this side of the garden.  I didn't notice this one until I almost grabbed hold of it along with the debris I was clearing out!  It sat there with its back to me for quite a few minutes before moving off.  I'm hoping that once we get the new pond area set up we'll find more froggy visitors/residents in the garden 😊

Peace...

 

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)  

Still slogging away...

image from Magnific.com

I'm still running behind with the photo-sharing, but I left you on Monday with the "new" area finally cleared ~ along with a pulled muscle 😏

I told you previously that I was planning to give the wooden retaining wall at least a couple more coats of woodstain.  I thought I should give it a bit of a clean first, though, as it had got a tad muddy.  So I set-to with a bucket of soapy water and a handbrush...

...only to find that it didn't really look much different after a good wash-down 😄  Still, at least I know it's had the soil washed off ready for restaining 😉  Although we're going to put a long raised bed along the wall we still put down some weed membrane, which we pushed beneath said wall as far in as we could poke it.  We're going to have stone chipping paths running alongside the rebuilt wall, as well as in front of the new raised bed, so thought it would be easier to just lay the membrane across the whole area.  Once the bed has been put in place we will cut across the membrane within it and attach the "flaps" to the inside.  Hopefully that will help to stop the soil escaping out the bottom into the stone chippings.

We've come to a bit of a pause with the new area now, as Adrian is working on the raised bed(s).  I think I told you that we decided to build it in two separate halves?  Anyhoo, he's got one half built and is currently working on the second.  It's really not so much the building of the things that takes up the time, it's more to do with slapping on a few coats of stain and having to wait for each coat to dry before applying the next!    

I had laid the old pond on the patio so it was out of the way until we needed to re-use it, but the wind picked up and it was being shunted around the garden!  Obviously I didn't want it to get damaged, so decided to corral it in one of the empty veggie beds ~ good thinking, eh 😏

Despite the less than seasonal weather we've been having...

the view from the bench has still been lovely, especially during those odd patches of blue skies and sunshine 😊 

Little words of wisdom

 

A clean slate

image from Magnific.com

It's taken a whole lot of the proverbial blood, sweat and tears but we eventually got the old wildlife area cleared.  Well, not "blood" exactly but I did manage to pull muscles I didn't even know I had 😉 I made myself take a break because I didn't want to make things worse ~ it's been like having a "stitch" just under my ribs on the right-hand, and under my shoulder blade on the same side at the back 😖

I suspect what did it was raking the soil over the area to try to make it more level ~ perhaps I was a bit too gung-ho 😏  Anyhoo, we got to this stage in a shorter time than we thought we would which was a nice surprise as we've had a fair few rainy days.  The raked soil disappeared into the hole where the old pond had been but will need some more added from the soil mountain out the back in due course.  What we've put in there needs to be tamped down as it's very soft ~ every time we forget ourselves and step in the area our feet sink in!

The next job on the list is to get the raised bed built ~ or to be more accurate "beds" as to make life a tad easier, it's going to be made in two sections which will then be joined together.  Luckily we had enough wood stored away to build it, just having to buy in some posts for the corners and more screws.  Whilst Adrian is occupied with that I'll clean off the wooden retaining wall and give it a couple more coats of stain, which will be easier to do before we get the bed installed.  The bed is only going to be two boards high, but will eventually be planted up with shrubs relocated from elsewhere in the garden to create a visual barrier from the patio as it's higher than the wildlife area.  I'm also considering fixing some trellis along the back of the new raised beds, but haven't quite made up my mind yet.  As I've said many times before, the joys of living on a hill, eh 😳

Once the raised beds are in place, we will be laying out an L-shaped path running in front of them and continuing down alongside the stone wall.  There's still a helluva lot of manual labour to get done before we reach the stage of building the new wildlife pond area!

And to finish off this post I thought I'd share a photo I took the other day, when I was sitting on the patio bench having a little break ~ it really does show just how out of line the other half of the garden wall is!

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)   

Carnage!

Again, I'm not talking about next-door's cat 😄 I'm sure he must have some nice sunny spots in his own garden, but I half suspect he regards this as his garden too 😏 

I left you on Tuesday, my lovelies, with the grand rediscovery of the wildlife pond ~ which by this point of the dreadful neglect inflicted upon it, was looking rather more like a bog!

Little-by-little, though, we cleared away all the detritus.  I have kept a few of the plants that were here but most of it was overgrown rosa rugosa, fuchsia and weeds all of which I most definitely did not want to keep 😉

This massive piece of sycamore stump was over to the right of the pond.  Once we'd cleared off the stuff that had taken root on it, we were able to roll it away.

I wasn't sure that anyone would be interested as it's a hefty beast, but one of the chaps who took about half of the other logs happily took this as well.  It was quite the feat though for him to get it out of the garden and into his trailer, even with Adrian's assistance 😲

It's not easy to tell from this photo, but the ground does slope away from the wooden retaining wall, so that helped in moving the "giant economy sized" piece of tree stump.

Eventually we will be making a new wildlife area, complete with a (possibly larger) pond, so I have kept a few of the logs to reuse as insect habitat.

Then came the none-too-pleasant task of emptying out the old pond ~ it was a tad stinky and slimy 😒  We were both surprised at the depth of the pre-formed pond we'd used ~ we definitely don't remember digging out quite such a deep hole!

By the time we'd got to this stage, we were both knackered and the area looked like a bomb had hit it 😳  We decided to let the debris from the pond dry out for a couple of days so that it (hopefully) wouldn't be quite so heavy when we bagged it up ready to be taken to the tip.

We can now more easily see what needs to be done in order to bring our plans to fruition.  Our first task of course will be to thoroughly clear the area of weeds, etc, so that we are starting off with a nice clean slate. We then plan to level off the ground as much as is possible ~ that pond hole will come in useful for raking excess soil into 😄  We currently have another little soil mountain out in the back garden (from where we emptied out the raised beds that were previously in the new patio area), so no doubt we will be making use of some of that to finish filling in the pond hole.

Step one of the garden rehash will be to get the raised bed built along the wooden retaining wall.  We have quite a lot of wood stored away that we can hopefully make use of, so fingers crossed that we won't have to spend too much money!  It will also be interesting to see how much of the soil mountain is left once the bed has been filled.  I probably won't relocate any shrubs until later in the year, when we've got the hottest weather out of the way.  There's also bound to be weeds lurking in the soil, so it will be useful to clear out as many of the pesky little blighters as possible before planting any of the shrubs. 

We have a pretty good idea of what we're going to do in this part of the garden but rather than inflicting "information overload" upon you, I'll tell you more about our plans as we go along 😊

A sharp intake of breath...

I swear I could almost feel our credit card "wince" when Adrian paid the bill at the opticians on Tuesday ~ a little over £1,000 in total for our four new pairs of glasses 😲  To be fair the bulk of that was for my new specs, which are always expensive with the lenses that I have 😏

Neither of our prescriptions had changed very much at all, so in theory we could have just carried on with the specs that we already had.  However, I have two pairs so that I can alternate between them (I wear glasses all the time) and one pair had a scratch right across the middle of one of the lenses so I thought I might just as well have the new prescription put in them.  Rather than just replacing the lenses in my other old pair, I decided to have a new frame as well which in the scheme of things really wasn't the expensive part!  Adrian, likewise, had had his old glasses for a number of years and they were looking a tad battered hence his two new pairs.

We had our eye examination a couple of weeks ago and whilst Adrian's was generally okay, mine threw up a couple of things *sigh*  My eyes in general are healthy enough but the optomotrist told me that I have a freckle on the iris of my right eye.  I can't really recall a time when I didn't have that little speck there, to be honest, but wasn't aware that it was actually a freckle.  She said that she sees them regularly and they are pretty common, just like having freckles anywhere ~ I certainly have them elsewhere about my person!  She told me that it was certainly there on my last eye examination a couple of years ago, but their more up-to-date equipment has shown it in much clearer detail.  Because it has now been shown to be a freckle she wants to monitor it for a while to ensure that it doesn't change, in much the same way that one would keep an eye on freckles or moles anywhere on one's body.

Slightly more worrying is another issue that the examination showed up ~ I am apparently in the very early stages of developing cataracts.  To be honest I haven't noticed any difference to my vision and the optomotrist said that it will most likely be a number of years before I do.  So fingers crossed that I won't need cataract surgery for some time to come 🤞

I had my 65th birthday last Saturday ~ the joys of getting older, eh 😒   

Little words of wisdom

 

An overgrown mess *sigh*

 

No, not next-door's cat obviously!  He likes to sun himself in our garden and doesn't seem at all bothered by the weedy, overgrown borders ~ he just plonks himself down regardless 😄

This, my lovelies, is the actual overgrown mess to which I was referring 😳  I was talking about having to get it sorted out early last year but we just didn't get round to tackling it.  Somewhere in there, believe it or not, is a little wildlife pond!

Having to have the wall rebuilt gave us the proverbial kick up the backside that we needed, so once George had finished we made a start.

Because we want to build a raised bed along this wooden retaining wall, the only sensible option was to raze the whole area to the ground 😖

It's been pretty hard work, as you can no doubt imagine by looking at these photos!

There was originally just ONE rosa rugosa planted in this side area, but omg the bloody thing spread all over the place 😮

Eventually, though, we found the wildlife pond ~ hurrah!

We had edged the area with pieces of wood from the two sycamore trees we had to have removed when we first moved here, but I didn't realise just how much of the stuff we had made use of 😄  It was quite the pile, as you can see, but I'm happy to report that I advertised it on our local Facebook market page as "free to take away" and it was snapped up in double-quick time ~ one less thing to have to worry about getting rid of!