Two down, one to go.

Last night I opted to watch the coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show whilst Luke had a go at removing the first of the conifers. I heard voices and was pleased that Nick next door had come to help (that took the guilt away from me that I was leaving Luke to sort it). Although I cannot report on their working practise (I fell asleep!) they had managed to prise it from the ground by 9.00pm, only an hour after starting. How strange it is to see the house next door now rather than a mass of greenery.
Luke has had the bright idea of putting a log store where the trees were, thus stopping anyone from looking up into the garden from the side entrance and also to keep seasoned wood just outside the door so we can nip out and grab an armful when we need a fire. So my herbs will stay where they are (good job really as I am getting twitchy about having to move so many plants at completely the wrong time of year). Luke informed me that we would have to move the raspberries which also means having to move the roses (they are in a holding bed at the moment until I have a place to plant them but the raspberries need to go exactly where the roses are). All four roses there are out in full flower and aren't going to take kindly to being moved. Nor are the raspberries that are just started to plump up and ripen.




When we got home at 7.00pm we saw that Nick had proved as good as his word and taken down the middle conifer. Luke is now outside digging at the last one whilst Nick is putting together a chimenera outside and I've just heard the other neighbour, Jack, shout that he is bringing over his chainsaw! Men, hey? How lovely to be surrounded by so many capable ones which means I don't have to do it myself. Luke's crashcourse in chainsawing is about to begin. Cover your ears!

An hour later - they are all out, Whey hey.

Mahonia movement.

I've also dug up the jasmine which was planted along the border and can go back to climb up the fence once it's in place unless I plant it up in the front garden.
When we first moved to this house, fifteen months ago, I moved some mahonias which were in the wrong place and quite weedy looking. They didn't appreciate being moved when it was so cold and I lost a couple of them. Two of them though, planted close together to make them look lusher have thrived and leafed up considerably. How happy they are in their spot makes it harder to justify moving them again - at the wrong time of year and fairly soon after the last move. Trouble is, they are slap bang in the centre of the boundary and will have to be uprooted for the fence so best to give them a great slosh of water, have their well watered newly dug hole ready with plenty of space for the roots and transplant them within minutes from one hole to the other. Firming down the soil around them to stop them rocking in the breeze and ensuring there are no air pockets around the roots and then another much longer watering (in fact I just put the hose pipe at the base for over five minutes). All we can do now is water again over the next few days and hope.

Whilst typing this up we have been distracted by a great tit who has been working through the peanuts in the feeder at a tremendous rate of knots. The feeder hangs from a shrub and the cat next door often hides underneath hoping a tit will land on the ground and present itself unwillingly as her supper. The chickens love the place too as any nuts which fall from the feeder are soon vacuumed up by them and Luke has been wondering if the tit we have been watching going through the nuts and rejecting four or five by throwing them over the side is actually doing it to entice our chicks over and in doing so ensuring that the cat isn't hiding in the shrub. I'm not sure but it was fun to see him pick up a nut in his beak, throw it over the side and do it again and again before finding one he seems happy to eat. Aren't they meant to sing for their supper?

Hens versus Delphinium

I've had chicken wire around the delphiniums ever since I planted them after one was stripped by hungry beaked birds (yes, the blooming hens again). We feel that the pleasure we and the chickens get from letting them meander through our garden outweighs the occasional damaged plant. I noticed today that one of the delphiniums wasn't protected by the chicken wire. Ah well, I thought, I'll get onto that once I have finished cutting into the conifers. Well, I deserved what I got which was one bare delphinium  with no leaves left whatsoever fifteen minutes after I'd looked at it. This pathetic skinny stemmed excuse of a plant serves me right. Just a shame for the plant as it was looking pretty good till then. Of course when I checked it out again and found it desimated the hens were nowhere to be seen. Typical.

 Before and after.

Goodbye to green.

It's midday on Thursday, 26^th May. I've just come in from an hour's hard work in the garden. I'm soaked with sweat and drizzle and yet the minute I start to type this up at the dining table the sun shows itself and the garden is basked in light. The dark clouds are rapidly being blown across the sky, uncovering those fluffy cotton-wool beauties whose arrival brightens up any sky. I love looking at them from above when in a plane. The sun shines brightly on them and they look like little worlds of candyfloss.

Do you remember that just a few short months ago we spent a weekend trimming back the conifer hedge we have directly outside the French windows which give us untold privacy on our deck? We have always smiled at the fat sparrow who clings to the tallest stem which was out of the reach of our loppers. He used to sway precariously from side to side on this whip of green before whizzing off to the nest in next doors' guttering. Here he is in, for him, happier days.

You'll also remember the incident with Milo, the new neighbours' dog and our hens then? Our chickens now take one look at the dog in his garden and scamper off up the ramp to the safety of their hen house where they will perch for hours, missing out on the freedom of the run and totally unaware that Milo, having yapped and raced around the lawn for several minutes has now happily trotted back indoors and is no threat to them. We've all agreed that a fence is in order and as the neighbours also expressed an interest in the conifers being removed so their planned extension would not butt up against them that is what I've been labouring away at through the rain.

Luckily there were no nests in the trees so it was all systems go on lopping down the side branches to make it easier for Luke to cut the main trunks. We hope to use the stumps to aid removal . Once we've loosened the soil around the knot of roots we'll rock the stumps to free them from the ground. That's the plan; let's see how far we stray from that idea!

Now of course, whilst there is plenty of daylight showing through the emaciated trunks it has also opened up the view for our neighbours and given us more of an idea what the garden will eventually look like with a fence running along it's length. I think we'd all have liked to have just had shrubs to keep the natural look but the neighbours, lovely as they are, have found out what we knew all along – that dogs and chickens do not live happily alongside one another once dogs have found how much fun it is to chase chicks.

So a barrier will be going up and our view will change dramatically. Now I've chopped back the thick of the branches I am starting to get excited at the changing shape of the garden. With the conifers gone it will be more uniform and also provide us with a perfect place to grow herbs. It's the place to grow them, just by the house so that you literally step out, tweak the herb you need and step back in again. This is especially useful in the winter months when a long walk up the sodden garden in the rain to grab a pinch of herbs is a chore. I'm not going to rush anything though – we will wait and see what the fence looks like, how we feel about the rest of the garden once the dynamics have changed and besides, by the time the arduous work of digging great holes, sinking in fence posts, nailing or screwing in lengths of wood and painting the whole thing we may be fed up of anything to do with the garden (I don't really believe that). For now, I am off to admire my handiwork which now consists of two enormous piles of unruly branches and three punk conifers with nothing but Mohawks left of their lushness.

 

 

The tree tops are all that's left. Below, one pile of branches on the deck, getting as high as five feet whilst the overspill ends up on the garden.

Friends for dinner.

We've been lax this weekend. Not for us the boring and digging to produce large spaces for fence posts although Luke did buy an auger to make the task easier. I thought we were going to cut down the conifers to about five feet tall so we could prise them out of the ground (the new neighbours want to build an extension and are worried about the roots; we don't mind keeping them or taking them out but for neighbourly relations we are going to get them out)

Instead we went to town and I spent half the day trying on clothes for our upcoming holiday.

Last night, our friends, Tim and Michelle came over for a meal and Tim asked to walk around the garden. Whilst I went in one direction with Michelle, who asked if she'd put her foxglove in too sunny a postilion and that was why it had failed (I explained that foxgloves will work in shade or sun but will grow taller in shade). Tim went straight to the veg patch. Originally Tim and Luke had an allotment together (you can see their story at weeditandreap.co.uk) but after a few years we decided that we wanted a garden to incorporate a vegetable patch. I had this long held and much cherished memory of plump sweetcorn, freshly picked from my grandparent's garden before being stripped of it's leaves and plunged into boiling water to end up in front of me bathed in butter and cracked pepper all within twenty minutes. I've heard that the sugar in sweetcorn turn to starch after twenty minutes so the thought of picking produce and having it on our plates ten minutes later is too appealing. Not that the peas will last that long, they will be sampled straight from the pod whilst I am standing in the middle of a row of pea shoots.

Our roses, whilst still not planted up, are bursting with buds and we had a few white and pink roses in a little tea glass on the dinner table. To be able to add our own produce in the shape of chubby carrots, tender peas, buttered potatoes and luscious courgettes will be even better. Just a few more months till our anticipated glut