Flexing our muscles

image from Magnific.com

Although I suppose to be more accurate, Adrian has been flexing his muscles somewhat more than I have 😉

We got most of what needed to be shifted out of this front wall border.  The hypericum has gone into the latest of the raised beds that we recently got in place.  It was planted much too close to the climbing rose (Claire Austin), which was suffering somewhat as a result.  Hopefully it will feel better now that it isn't being crowded out!  The rosa rugosa beside the hypericum has been dug out completely.  It really had turned into a terrible thug, spreading across as well as out of the border 😒  I fully expect to be pulling up shoots for sometime yet to come 😳

There was another, much more well-behaved, rose to the left of the buddleia which has been relocated.  The buddleia itself will be left in the border until we've got the last raised bed in place, which won't be until next year now methinks.  In the meantime, much as I really like it, the alchemilla mollis has also been dug out.  I have more plants in other parts of both the front and back gardens, so I'm not getting rid of it entirely 😊

The weigela (between the buddleia and escallonia) is staying put, even though I planted it a little too close to the latter really.  I just don't think it's worth all the effort involved to get poor Adrian to dig it out and then me replant it just a little further along from its original spot!  I have another two weigelas in other parts of the front garden that will be dug up and moved to this border in due course.  We can get one moved as soon as we feel like it, as it will be going near to the climbing rose ~ although not too close, obviously 😉  The other one will have to wait until we've been able to move the buddleia.

  Once the weigelas are all in their new home I will probably relocate a couple more shrubs from elsewhere in the front garden to join them.  I don't intend to have any other plants in this border, although there are spring bulbs in there that I'm happy to leave in situ and I will probably add more over time.  I'm just going to top it with a good layer of bark chippings to finish it off.  I'm still not sure what to do with the little area on the other side of the climbing rose.  It's full of crocosmia at the moment and I'm contemplating digging it all out as the bloody stuff does tend to take over.  I might replace it with something low-growing and, if possible, evergreen.

The "well behaved" rose from the border has gone into this large pot, which used to stand near the dining room window.  We were lazy and moved it without emptying out the soil!  It was pretty damn heavy but we managed to shift it nevertheless, and it saved some time and effort not to have to dig out all the soil and then refill it again.  Thankfully it didn't have to go far across the stone chippings 😏

The rose is The King's Rose (again, from David Austin).  It only has a light scent when I would normally go for something stronger, but it has such a pretty pink and white striped flower that I couldn't resist it!  I now have matching pots either side of this long bed, both with roses.  The pink blooms you can see in the photo are on the rose in the tub behind: Eustacia Vye.

I've also managed to get the second planter finished.  The rose in the centre is Desdemona, the second of my recent new purchases from David Austin.  As with the other planter, I dug up some more of the London Pride plants from one of the borders to set along the back, with the two little alpine plants I'd put aside planted either side of the rose.

We're both pretty pleased with how much we've managed to achieve so far this year, a lot more than we thought we would to be honest.  If we continue to get some good days, then hopefully we'll get a bit more done before we have to stop for the winter 🤞

Dodging the downpours

"Mr Grumpy" from next-door, looking down his nose at us when we spotted him from the living room window the other day 😏  I think he's a bit annoyed that we are altering "his" garden 😉

We got some more work done last week but it really was a case of having to do bits here and there between the showers ~ some of which were actually rather bloody heavy!  Of course all the rain is also making the soil pretty damn heavy and claggy, so even when it wasn't raining it wasn't particularly nice to dig in the stuff 😳 

I had to make an effort, though, as the plants I'd ordered from Shire Plants arrived and I really needed to get them in the garden.  I started with the new little herb bed that I had finally managed to get cleared out.  We don't use a lot of fresh herbs in the kitchen, so the few I have now planted are ample for our needs.  I already had the chives, which came out of the planter which matches the one now on the new patio.  I added rosemary, oregano, two different varieties of thyme, and mint ~ the latter (hopefully!) safely ensconced in a pot, obviously 😏

The second planter from the kitchen courtyard has now been beefed up, given a few more coats of wood stain, and put in its new position on the patio.  Adrian made inroads into the soil mountain in the back garden when he filled up the planter; he then moved the soil that was left and dumped it into the empty raised bed in the front garden had been used as a holding bed for the plants I had dug up and wanted to keep.

He's very pleased to get the soil shifted, even though it will have to be moved onto a tarpaulin next year so that we can dismantle the bed to re-use it.  He really wanted to clear the area in the back garden so that he can easily access our second log-store over the coming months.  With the weather being so changeable there doesn't seem to be much point in trying to get the last raised bed in position in the front garden, not least because it will need a few coats of wood stain.  We may just get the new sleepers ordered and set them in place on the days when it isn't bucketing down with rain 😏

I finished off the first planter on the patio by adding an alpine-type plant either side of the rose.  I had already put in some London Pride plants along the back ~ there were a lot of them in the garden when we bought the house so I dig 'em up and use them to fill in gaps where needed!

I've saved two of the little alpine plants for the second planter and used the rest of them to make a little rock garden in the old wheelbarrow.  I made use of some of the fine stone chippings we had originally used for the paths between the old kitchen garden beds, both to mix in with the compost to help it drain more freely and to top off around the plants.  The pebbles and cobblestones were a mix of some we'd brought with us when we moved, and some we'd found in the garden here.

It's a simple little display but I am very pleased with how it's turned out 😊

Flexing those muscles...

image from Magnific.com

Well, sort of 😏 To be fair, Adrian has been doing most of the "proper" muscle-flexing ~ under my supervision, of course 😄

I mentioned previously that we were going to reuse the old kitchen garden beds to create the new, purely, ornamental ones.  The first one to be moved was the old strawberry bed.  Before we relocated the strawberries into it, it was smaller and Adrian extended it with odds 'n' sods of wood.  This made the bed really weighty and it took a lot of muscle-flexing on the part of Adrian to lift the bloody thing, with me prising it up as much as I could manage with a long iron pole that my Dad gave me years ago. 

We were able to shuffle it across the (thankfully!) short stretch of garden to lean it against the new raised bed.  Adrian then spent a fair amount of time prising off the old bits of tattered weed membrane that had been tacked to the inside.  He wanted to clean it up as much as possible so that he could get some fresh coats of wood stain on it.

The space where the bed had been looked like a flippin' grave when it had been moved 😳  We've already started to whittle the soil down, though, and it won't take long before it's level with the ground around it.

It took some huffing and puffing but in the end we got it in its new position.  It's amazing how smart it now looks after three fresh coats of wood stain!  The canes in the new bed, by the way, are just markers for when I start to move shrubs into it 😊  The very large pot to the left was one of two that originally stood against the front of the house.  At some point I will get the matching pot emptied out and moved to stand at other side of the new bed.

We have also now shifted some of the stone chippings from further down the garden to create this new path.  All the stone chippings are gradually being moved from the lower part of the kitchen garden area; eventually it will be grassed over.

As you can see, I've been "shopping" from the garden to plant up the first of the patio containers.  I also brought a few little bits and pieces round from the kitchen courtyard.  I was going to put one of the round tubs where the chair now is but changed my mind.

I also put a largish pot (that I already had) beside the bench, again filled with plants from elsewhere in the garden.  The black rectangular thing currently being stored beneath the bench is the new pond; hopefully we'll be able to get it in position before too long.  

I'm so thrilled with my beautiful white peony 😍  I couldn't get a very good photo, though, as it was a tad windy at the time.  This is the first year that it's flowered so well ~ I'm just hoping that it won't sulk too much when I move it later in the year!

Back and forth

image from Magnific.com

 I've been dividing my time between working in the front and back gardens.  As I mentioned previously, work in the new pond area in the front garden has come to a wee bit of a halt for now but there's definitely no lack of other stuff to be tackled 😏

The pots of strawberries needed a home, so I tidied up this bed and plonked them in it 😄  At the moment it's only a temporary holding place for them, but it may well become their permanent home once we've decided what we're doing with re-jigging the back garden.

The bed near the bathroom looked very untidy.

Once I got going, though, it wasn't as bad as it had first appeared although there was a rather large dandelion in there.  It took a bit of getting out as it was entwined with one of the little blackcurrants.  I ended up digging them both up so I could disentangle the bloody thing ~ hopefully the poor blackcurrant will recover from the shock of being uprooted and replanted in quick succession! 

It didn't take too long to pull out the remaining weeds, though, and I gave the bay tree a good trim as well.  I will have a poke about in the garden to see what I can move to fill up the gaps in the bed.  I don't really want to buy more plants if I can help it, so shopping from my own garden is the sensible way to go methinks 😉

Adrian got one half of the new bed built and we manhandled it roughly into place.  For now it's just keeping the weed membrane from flying away, but once the other section has been built we can get them both as level as possible in their permanent positions.  Whilst I was doing other stuff Adrian gave the retaining wall a couple of coats of wood stain, which has smartened it up very nicely.

As the planters in the kitchen courtyard had already been tidied up, I was able to get the soil out of the one that had no plants in it.  Once it was empty Adrian and I brought it round to the new patio (it was way too heavy for me to move by myself!), and over the course of a couple of days I gave the base three coats of wood stain.  The four sides were in much better condition so I only gave them two coats.

Adrian helped me to make good use of the soil by wheelbarrowing it out the front to top up the potato plants.  We seem to spend half our time shifting soil from one place to another at the moment 😄

Once the wood stain had fully dried, I wiggled the planter over to its new home on the patio.  At some point I intend to move the matching planter from the kitchen courtyard out there too, possibly with one of the round tubs set between the two.  This will provide a barrier along the wall which, as you may recall, is now lower than it was before it was rebuilt.  I don't yet know what I will be planting in these containers but once again I intend to shop from my garden.

Eventually we will buy some nice new garden furniture for the patio, moving the old bench down to the rebuilt nature/pond area.  Realistically it's very doubtful that we will be getting any furniture this year as we still have a lot of work to do in the garden, not to mention the fact that we haven't yet moved the other two containers out to the patio.  Once they are in place, though, we will know how much space we have available for new furniture and will be able to start looking around to see what lovely stuff is out there😊

A rather nice new area

image from Magnific.com

You may recall that the front patio area has undergone a number of iterations over the last few years, and whilst we're not yet at the stage suggested in the picture above it's something nice to aim for 😉

When we knew that the wall would have to be rebuilt, the only sensible thing to do was to completely clear the area to give George plenty of space to work in.

Once he'd finished and cleared out the leftover bits of rubbly stone, we decided that we didn't actually want to rebuild raised beds the same as we'd had before.

There were a few slabs leftover from the new border that George had done in the shared drive on the other side of the rebuilt wall... 

...so we asked him to get a few more to make this into a proper patio area.  It took a fair bit of fiddling about on his part to get the new paving laid as evenly as possible!  Our garden is very tricky with the different levels, and an awful lot of the time what the eye sees and what the spirit level says are two rather different things 😳  

As I've already mentioned, we will be adding some planters along both the far side and front of the area to make it a tad safer!  We're going to build a raised bed along the garden side of the wooden wall, up to a similar height, which I will plant with shrubs moved from various areas of the garden.  This will create a good visual barrier across the front.

I told you last year, after my health woes, that we have decided that it would be sensible to rehash a lot of the front garden, and altering the borders somewhat is part of those plans.  This is why I'm going to be "shopping" from the plants and shrubs I already have in the garden rather than going ahead and buying in new ones.  I'm afraid the garden is going to look rather messy and upside-down for quite some time to come😏   

Once the new raised bed has been built, I will feel comfortable about moving these wooden tubs across to sit alongside the new garden wall.  Rather than leaving an expanse of bare concrete, I may well relocate the old wheelbarrow (that we turned into a planter) here from the other side of the garden.  

We moved our old garden bench out to the new patio as it looked very open and bare!  We will be buying new furniture for the space in due course, but will take our time and wait until we've got the long planter built and the tubs moved across.

Even on an overcast day, we really are so lucky to have such lovely views from our new patio 😊

As usual I am running way behind with sharing photos of what we've been doing 😏 We actually started work down in the garden area last week but hopefully I'll get you all caught up with our latest trials and tribulations soon!

Playing catch-up ~ yet again!

image from Freepik

Apart from my reading round-up post earlier this week, I've been very remiss in posting recently.  It's not that I've been doing nothing, but I must confess that it's been a struggle to push myself to get on with things.  I mentioned in my last "proper" post that I was feeling pretty tired, and to be honest I've found it rather hard to shake that tiredness off.  Some of it is genuinely feeling tired with the physical work as I'm extremely overweight and unfit, plus I'm not as young as I used to be 😄  

However, there has been a large splodge of procrastination thrown in!  I worked my way round the relatively "easy" sections of the garden/kitchen garden but all the while the spectres of the ornamental borders in the front garden were dancing about in my head, most of which haven't been tackled for about three years 😱       

Behold, one of the overgrown borders 😏  Actually, I forgot to take a photo before we started to tackle it so this is after Adrian had dug out three overgrown shrubs!  I guess it doesn't look too horrendous from a distance.....

but once you get up-close-and-personal the disarray is plainly evident 😯  This photo was taken after some shrubs had been dug out, sadly not all of which were salvageable.

The poor rosa rugosa (which we inherited when we bought the house, and transplanted from the other side of the garden) had what I'd bought as a dwarf fuchsia planted in front of it.  Turns out that it wasn't such a well-behaved shrub after all ~ it just kept on growing and pushing into the poor rose.  Still, rosa rugosa are hardy buggers so I'm sure it will soon regrow into a better shape 🤞

Everything in the right-hand side of the border had got out-of-hand, too.  

We are still working on the border but already it was starting to look better by this point last week.

Whilst it's probably not the best time of year to trim it, I nevertheless decided to cut back the escallonia somewhat.  I didn't cut it down as low as I really wanted to as I didn't want to lose all the flowers.  I'll save the final chop for later in the year.  It doesn't look particularly pretty at the moment but like the rosa rugosa, escallonia are tough shrubs and I'm confident it will bounce back in due course.

We did manage to save three of the smaller shrubs, which have now gone into the low bed in the front patio area.  Needless to say, they have all lost their labels and I can't remember what they are called, although I believe the middle shrub may be Rose of Sharon 😕 

As you can see, I also moved the brazen mermaid bird bath (she was already in the garden when we bought the house) into the bed; one of these days I will get round to giving her a verdigris-type finish.....don't hold your breath, though, 'cos I've been saying that for the last seven years 😄

The peonies have been beautiful again this year.  I have no idea what variety these lovely red ones are as they were already in (different parts of) the garden when we moved in.  I planted a white-flowered one two or three years back which has been very slow to do anything, but this year it has a number of buds so I'm hoping for a good display in due course.

I'm way behind with greenhouse photos; these were taken a couple of weeks back.  As I mentioned in my last "proper" post I was contemplating tying the tomatoes to canes to help straighten them somewhat, which I have now done.  I'll try to remember to take some up-to-date photos to show you their progress.

The sweet pepper plug plants, Peppers from Heaven Orange, arrived looking a little sad.  They were pretty dry so I soaked them for a while, then put them into larger pots.  They looked like this for a few days but I'm happy to report that they have since perked up considerably ~ photos to follow in due course 😉

In the end, 15 of the 16 sunflower seeds germinated which I found immensely pleasing.  They are, of course, a fair bit larger by now 😄

Ta-daa!  I now have the perfect little spot for sheltering some of my plants that are not-so-keen on the cold and wet Orkney winter weather.  I can also use the shelf above the little grow houses to store the garden décor that might otherwise be damaged by being blown all over the place!  I'm so pleased with what Adrian has done with the old arbour seat, it's made such good use of something that was just going to waste.  I'm thinking of swapping the large tubs and chair display around at some point ~ I'll break the good news to poor 'ole Adrian in due course 😏

Chilly!

image from Clipart Library

 Friday saw me back in the garden, continuing to make the most of the dry weather.  It was lovely and sunny but the wind was bitingly chilly ~ thankfully my gardening gloves have a nice fleecy lining!  I was amazed to see a young woman walking her dog, wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt (the lass, not the dog, obviously 😄) ~ meanwhile yours truly was wearing a camisole beneath an old short-sleeved top along with an equally old cardigan and fleece jacket (all of which are saved for gardening and "dirty" jobs), topped off with a scarf and woolly hat 😯 

You may recall that I planted some celery last year.  The plants didn't do anything, not even putting on much growth, nevertheless the ones that survived have come through the winter.  As you may have guessed, I have no idea what I'm doing here ~ I've decided to just let the plants do their own thing and see what happens!

I decided to get all the vegetable beds weeded before things started to get out of hand.  There were more weeds in the asparagus bed than the other three, but even so it really didn't take long at all to tidy them up.  I'm not convinced, by the way, that the asparagus will grow this year as there is no sign of any shoots whatsoever.  If nothing is forthcoming I think I shall probably put it down to experience and use the bed as part of the crop rotation.

This is the old strawberry bed, which I have now planted up with this year's potato crop.  I have two varieties: Kestrel and Jazzy.  As you know, I like to divide my beds into approximately 12"/30cm squares to try to give some semblance of order 😉  I find this works out very nicely for my potato crops ~ I can just put one seed potato in the middle of each square and then I roughly know where to start harvesting in due course.  There were only 10 Kestrel seed potatoes making up the 1kg I bought, so I decided to move a couple of the pots of tulips (that I'm growing for cutting) into two of the corner spaces in the bed.  I had too many Jazzy for the 12 allocated squares, so the leftovers have now been planted in large pots.  I did that yesterday and the pots are now sitting beside bed number 5, on the Jazzy side of course 😃 

Once I'd finished with the raised beds, I turned my attention to the upper patio area.  I completely forgot to take any "before" photos, but to be honest you probably wouldn't notice much difference 😄  The tubs had barely any weeds in them, so it was mostly a case of lightly pruning the roses and buddleja and "fluffing up" the soil after being pounded by wet weather over the winter.  I also gave the roses a sprinkling of rose feed granules, and the buddleja a scattering of chicken manure pellets.

Everything in the raised bed ~ that Adrian made taller last year ~ has survived both being moved from elsewhere in the garden, and the ravages of the winter weather.  Again, there weren't too may weeds to be dealt with although there were a few dandelions that I know I didn't get completely pulled out, so they will be putting in an appearance again very soon no doubt 😒

Look what I found!  That, my lovelies, is a piece of the humungous fuchsia that Beverly and Lyndi removed from beside the pond last year!  Good job I found it otherwise it would be trying to make a come-back bid 😏