Planting out an olive

Today I planted out one of our olive trees. It's been in a pot for several years and I find it very hard to keep it sufficiently watered. A couple of years ago it nearly died because of this and although it's getting better again, it hasn't fully recovered. It was outdoors in its pot this winter, just as usual, and seemed not to suffer for it. So since watering seems to be more of an issue with it than cold, I've decided to try it in the ground. I planted it in a bed that is a little raised but still fairly lush, so I hope this suits it. I have asked the surrounding apple trees to be nice to it! This year it will have tomatoes around it in the bed, to make it feel more at home.

Other than that I pottered about with pots. I've bought lots more petunias - I just love them. Next year I'll grow my own. Some of these are a stunning deep blue, like midnight blue velvet.

I've got my beady eye on the "in bloom" competition the town runs for houses (and other categories). I'm very aware that the garden is still nowhere near tidy enough, but I hope it will be! Well, tidy by my standards anyway... it's never going to look like a city park. Hence all the petunia madness, to be honest. And I also just love the way these and the helichrysums fill out - it's like putting something raw and horrid looking into the oven, and then taking out a beautiful golden, risen cake!

Anyway, here are a few more photos from today.







This little rose is Phyllis Bide (Bide, 1923) - she's actually a rambler, I have her not-very trained along part of the front fence. To be honest I wouldn't plant her again because I only like the flowers in the early stage of opening, but she has lovely foliage too:

Do you think seedlings actually breed?

There seem to be more and more seedlings every day, even if I don't sow any more!



At the moment this is my favourite plant - a viburnam judii, with the most gorgeous perfume:



I thought you might also like to see this snap of Velvet, just about to drink from the pond:



And finally this is a front garden in a village near us. I am determined now to sow deep red wallflowers and plant creamy white narcissi and some more primulas, for next spring:

Guess what...

... yet another busy day!

It rained overnight, and the garden looked so much the better for it today. All washed and freshened up. No doubt this applied to the weeds too but never mind!

First thing, I found out that Whichford Pottery will give me a credit note for the pot of theirs that broke over the last few winters. I don't know how much for yet, but I spent a pleasant time over breakfast with their catalogue.

Then I went out and spent ages tarting up the patio. I binned the broken pots, planted out various plants from them, and filled others with self-sown pretty things to look nice over the week-end (mainly forget-me-nots, and something I had hoped would be dicentra but I suspect is welsh poppies).

I planted out 2 of my very numerous tomato plants. I know it's very early but if we lose them, the are plenty of reinforcements. They're under a light movable cold-frame at the moment.

Finally a picture of what the boggy bed looks like at the moment, with another of what it looked like on the 10th January.

Odds and ends

A lot more seeds are coming up now - I think I'm most chuffed with the echium, since I love them so much. They're great in containers because they actually prefer to be pretty dry.

I began this afternoon (was busy otherwise in the morning) by starting to clear the patio. I don't use weed-killer on it so I weed it by hand and I'm fastidious. I know my husband finds the effort I put into this amusing and to be honest it is a bit daft but there you go.

As part of this I also weed all the patio pots, move them and clean underneath, and so on. As I was emptying one big pot I must have knocked the switch for the pond pump next to it. I have half an ear on the outflow all the time now (after last summer's disaster) so I was shocked and worried when it stopped, before I twigged what had caused it! But this put me in mind that I needed to begin clearing out the filter chamber.

Cleaning the filter is a piggy job, with one saving grace. The water flows through 4 different compartments, with filter medium of increasing fineness. The work is actually done by microorganisms that live on the medium, so when we clean it out, we do it one chamber per day, so as not to remove all the necessary good bugs. Therefore I get fairly messy over 4 days, rather than totally disgusting in 1!

I'm intending to post some pictures of the garden tomorrow. My father-and-step-mother-in-law are coming to visit for Easter and they like gardening, so I'm looking forward to showing it all to them. It's good to have a fixed point to aim for.

The Pond

Someone asked whether we have fish in the pond. You bet we do! We inherited 4 koi in our previous house, and we grew very fond of them, so we made a pond here.

We wanted a depth of nearly 5 feet for protection from heron. We tried digging the hole ourselves but it began to fill with water very quickly and frankly was jolly hard work. We got a builder in; I assumed he'd use a machine but he sent a man with a spade and a wheel-barrow! Said man worked like a trojan and in 2 days excavated a hole so neat it looked like something computer-generated on screen.

The hole was 5 feet deep; the pond is now a little less because of its linings: first sand, then old carpet, then heavy butyl liner. There is a shelf for marginal plants along the long edge, and the liner rises and dips again beyond that to make a marsh strip. A filter keeps the water fairly clean and oxygenated. Neither our dog nor our cat have disturbed the fish; we have seen heron visit the garden (an awesome sight!) but the fish have not been killed or injured by them.

Our set-up is a compromise: it's not the koi enthusiast's ideal, because we have plants in, we allow frogs etc (which can bring parasites), and we rarely use chemicals in it. It works very well, in our eyes. There was a major problem last year when I didn't report to my husband in time that the filter pump had stopped working. Half the fish died from lack of oxygen. I later learned that fish live much closer to the margin of feasibility, in terms of how they breathe, than we do, and so oxygenation is a key point. I still remember lifting out the dead fish each time I go near the pond, but I hope this will lessen.



I absolutely love the pond. I wish we could have a waterfall but I understand this is not easily arranged because of technical problems (essentially the filter chamber is configured wrongly for that to work, it's hard to see how we could have one without replacing the whole system which would be daft).

The end of the beginning

Today I weeded most of the remaining large bed. Despite nice enough weather it was cold and the bed is hard work, weeding underneath and round roses and digging out our friend, the bindweed.





Pippa kept me company.



One of my next jobs is going to be to prune the roses. This is one of my favourites (I find it very hard to choose) - it's a dark red, with a gorgeous perfume, and flowers from about July onwards until the frost. I tried to move it a few years ago but the roots were amazing! It is one of the few plants in the garden from before we came which I love, the others being the apple trees and a white spirea.

And this frogspawn has appeared in the pond.



Bob asked whether we have fish - yes. Maybe I'll talk about them tomrrow, since it's forecast to be wet.

Before and after: hmmm.....

Today began with lovely sunshine after a frosty night.















This evening I was hoping to post some before and after shots of the work I've done over the last two afternoons. Well, I'll still post them, through bloodymindedness alone. But they don't show anywhere near the difference I expected. And at most, it looks so negative - as though a plague of giant gobbling creatures had descended!




















It makes me wonder a little whether this blogging lark isn't getting a bit out of proportion. I write my blog in the hope that, as well as amusing a few folk, it will help to keep me motivated to continue working on the garden. I don't do the garden in order to blog about it! So if the pictures don't reflect the extent of the work, or if they make seem negative what was in fact immensely satisfying to do, that shouldn't really matter.



I told my father on the phone today how much time I'd spent in the garden in the last 10 days and he said it must be pretty tidy by now. It isn't. About 85% of it is still a dog's breakfast. This is a testament to the amount of neglect it's been treated to over the last 2 years by yours truly. But now by keeping a blog I intend to stick with things in the garden through a full year!