A whole lot of thinking going on...

image from Freepik.com

As I mentioned yesterday, we've been away south visiting family and friends.  We tend to travel by train so it's a long 'ole journey that we break with an overnight stop either in Inverness or

 Edinburgh.  To while away the hours when we're not admiring the passing scenery there's plenty of napping and reading taking place, not to mention mulling over things to be done with the house and garden.  This trip has mostly seen me thinking about the garden, with some side-stepping into the ongoing trauma of dolls' house stairs which I'll be posting about later on my dolls' house blog 😏

We managed to do quite a lot of weeding before we went south, going over the areas we'd already done to keep the newly-emerged weeds at bay, and also made a start on the ornamental borders.  Well, I say "borders" as in the plural, but in reality it was only the border running along the path from the front gate.

It looks even worse in this photo because the border on the kitchen garden side is nice and tidy!  Still, the border on the other side is now cleared of weeds ~ for the time being, at least 😒 It's been a while since we worked on any of these ornamental borders, and to be honest I'd forgotten how awkward this one along the path can be.  It's not a border that we created, it was already here and we simply edged it with a sleeper.  It's just a little bit too wide to reach from one side only, and working from the path is a bit of a nuisance because of the handrail ~ nine times out of ten we forget it's there, go to stand up, and whack our heads on the bloody thing.  I was getting more and more annoyed as I was weeding, having to keep ducking beneath the handrail each time I moved along, and in the end came to the conclusion that it would be better to empty the border entirely and extend the grass into it.  Looking to the future, methinks it will also be easier to simply mow grass than have to keep dealing with the weeds here!

Once the weeds and yet more of the dwarf elder had been dug out, I could see that there weren't that many plants and shrubs in there.  

I will be able to find homes for them over here in due course, in the beds to the left and right.  I really need to get up-to-date with photos, but suffice to say that the beds to the left and centre are now both empty, and the alchemilla mollis to the right has been moved.  The central bed is going to be demolished, and the pieces used to add an extra layer to the bed on the right to accommodate.....

as much as possible of the new soil mountain, created when we emptied out the central bed!  It won't take all of this soil, but hopefully what's left can be spread around the garden.  We may well also need to top up that border we are going to grass over in due course.

The other border that I was mulling over is this one.  Believe it or not there is a water bowl in the "foot" of the L-shape, at the far end.  The whole of this border has been overrun by buttercups and whatever the rust-coloured weeds are called.  The alchemilla mollis is also rampant, much too much so for such a relatively narrow border, so unfortunately it will have to come out.  I may be able to rehome it somewhere in the back garden.  I'm hoping that I will be able to rescue the border simply by pulling out the weeds, but if push comes to shove, then I will dig out everything in there and replant what I want to keep.  Methinks the water bowl section at least will certainly need to be completely emptied out and restarted from scratch.

Thankfully I don't think that the other borders in this side of the garden are quite as bad as they may appear, but even so there is an awful lot to be getting on with!