- the initial 2mm of earth was damp, the rest as dry as a dustbowl! It also rained at the Chelsea Show, so a grey day that we all really wanted, but a bit more rain would be good. I started a sunmapping exercise yesterday - maybe that's what caused it!
A lovely idea in a show garden - a green roof with all lavender on it. The shed will be ideal - clear away undergrowth, get it renovated and converted, maybe with a skylight in it too.
Must cut away some of the the sycamore branches though. ... Bryn says they have been pollarded and then growth has been from lower laterals.
Our first left hand bed on tier three now has Matucana Sweet Peas planted on its edge, under the netting 'ridge tent', after a colossal bindweed-removing operation. All knotted into the netting, of course, along with the dried stems of last year's. Various other weeds and masses of FMNs made the bed look really lusciously green, but all a big con! There's a lovely lemon balm in there though, and I'll plant Climbing French Beans on the other side of the netting, with a line of Radish inside I think. Although when it all grows up, maybe I wouldn't be able to harvest it, so will have to think of something else!
Note for next year is to cull some of the FMN early in the year...
The second bed has Autumn-fruiting Raspberries, also deeply festooned with bindweed. The strength of that plant - it has brought quite high stems (not cut back this year) down in arches, and then 'tied' them at the bottom. It's a painstaking job, cutting out the BW stem by stem, but it has to be done. Quite meditative especially as the blackbirds were singing away (about 6pm) and the sun making the edges of the leaves glow from the other side. A job for a few minutes each day, I think.
I must draw a plan of this, as a base map, and then think about where to put other veg.
On the other side of the path, abundant soft fruit!!! Summer raspberries just coming into a succession of ripening (had some for pudding - delicious!) and the berries turn out to be a mix of blackcurrants, red currants and maybe some white. All bowing over the path, so I used a long & stout Yellow Bamboo stem (cut from the bed outside the kitchen window) to tie them back, and then tied in some of the fruiting spurs. Nettles joining the bindweed here, so a long-trousered & shoes job, I think, not one for tonight. There will be lots -
talk to Helen again about a shared freezer.
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| Lammas pretending I'm not there |
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| Plume finds another way in! |
Lammas has been away all night & day, and just at bedtime she was there sitting on the top step... small glowy eyes and a slight smudge of white in the dark distance. 'No thanks I won't come in...' I put some food outside. I wonder if she was frightened away by a pale ginger cat who obviously has been ousted from the territory. Odd that Plume doesn't seem to mind - maybe she thinks it's a ghostly Lugh!
Yesterday I bought/rescued a Bougainvillea for the conservatory
and what have we done apart from... emptied 30+ boxes, set up the office, got a new dishwasher, sorted the shower out, planted and watered and weeded and weeded, and Michael has even found the secret path! The shed is big enough to convert into a garden room, especially if there's a veranda extension.
