Part gardening, part recovery post!

[Gardengirl]

Jo, love your curves, I mean the ones in your back garden, he, he......I attempted the same thing. Did you design & fabricate all of that yourself?

Aretha & DavRunner, enjoying your bright plethora of gardens, keep them coming.

We dealt with blight ruining our tomatoes last year & it sounds like we may get hit again this year. We also have ash borer hitting my tree's along our driveway which brings me great sorrow but I'm not giving up.

I'll try to get some photo's this week when the rain stops coming down upon us.

 

[Josephine]

Glad you like it, Gg. When I moved into the house, the garden was sloped with two oblongs of grass from house to back fence with an ugly paved path right down the centre and just a narrow planting border at the sides. So I had the garden terraced into the two areas and turfed all across the top area. But where the path had been, the grass seemed un-inclined to thrive. Plus I realised I had a lot of lawn

and very limited flower beds so I decided to make the lawn into two kidney shaped areas and put in a kidney shaped pond!

Right now there is very little planning involved in the planting, I tend to get plants that appeal to me and then look around for a gap to put them in!

Then later I think "why did I put that there - it would have been much better over there" by which time it's grown into a great big shrub or something! :th_heehee:

 

[aretha]

Jo, you are and continue to be a big inspirer in me to continue to work on this "garden in progress" of our new home called Tamarisk (which seems to have died lately) however, I have plans to buy another and plant it in the front of the bungalow where I think it would survive better.

You do so much in one day Jo, at present a couple of hours is the maximum that I can manage before my knee starts aching, wel my whole leg really!! But we have made some progress. We have at least placed molst of the acers around the garden to where they are doing the least damage to existing plants. There is a lot of campanula which is beautiful and a whole host of bellis daisies which I will take photos of tomorrow and post.

In the meantime I am posting a couple of piccies of the garden looking a bit like a garden centre, it has no real structure at present, but am making and drawing up plans for its future landscaping to include a pond, ar arbour and a decked area for us to simply sit and watch the birds, etc.

There is a large tree towards the end of the garden which unfortunately has to come down as it blocks some of the amazing views over the Solent, but at present has a resident family of Magpies, who are doing their utmost to frighten off almost all of the birds from entering the garden to use the bird table, and a fab blackbird with no tail (probably as a result of a fracas with the magpies) who sits in the elder tree next door and sings and sings all day long, its wonderful!

In the next few weeks we are building a garage, then the house extensions will be the next project, and finally the garden will have a revamp, taking care to make sure that all the plants get put where they will love it the most and where we can take pleasure from them too. Hopefully when the tree is gone the magpies will find somewhere else to live and we can regain all the bird families we were told frequent this garden.

I am hoping that the time spent in the garden will help strengthen my knee and help me loose weight too, and lower my blood pressure as the nurse at our new surgery visit said that it is too high!! Damn, I thought I was doing so well too.

More later.................

 

[aretha]

Sorry the garden one did not go in too large a file, so have simplified and fingers crossed. There are abut 7/8 of our acers in this photo, and fingers crossed the move does not seem to have affected them even though they are now getting far more breeze thatn they have had before but time will tell.

Byeee for now.

 

[Josephine]

Aretha, how glorious your garden is! And is that your exhausted hubby having a sit down?

 

[Gardengirl]

Aretha, your garden is a WOWZIE of color, I love it! Tuckered out your hubby?

 

[aretha]

Thanks Jo and GG, it certainly looks as though it tired my poor hubby out, but it is more a huge self-satisfied yawn that at last all the plants have been placed somewhere safe for the immediate future, and reflecting that now he has all the time in the world to sit and plan, knowing that he has the time to put it all into effect, and hopefully we will not be waiting years as per normal when you marry a builder, for our last home plans to be started and finished within months, not years of weekends and after work time!!

We have had some days now when we sat in the garden with a cup of tea and a cake, and just talked and planned, something that we have done so rarely in the past, and realised that this is what we had been waiting for for such a long time! Long may it last!:biggrin:

 

[Gardengirl]

Aretha, I just ran (not really) outdoors to snap photo's of my plantings but my attempts to upload repeatedly state I've failed. We built our home ourselves & the feeling of completion is so wonderful & a good deal of contentment with a glass of lemonade is a nice way to end the day.

Wish I could transfer the photo's but I'm dealing with the Emerald Ash Borer who has killed three of my tree's so I need to go outdoors & try to save the others. I really like my tree's:biggrin:! We are zone 4, what zone are you? I think I noticed a Japanese Maple in your yard, I would like one someday when I'm in a more hospitable climate.

 

[Josephine]

We're in the UK zone, GG!

 

[aretha]

Hi GG, Jo and I are both in the good old UK, and thankful for it. You are also right, we do have a Japanese maple, we call them acers, and we have 17 at the last count, all in tubs where they seem to flourish as I can keep them in acidic soil which they love, and move them around if they don't like a certain place in the garden. The only downside to keeping them in tubs is that every few years they need potting up again into a size larger tub, and now most of them are in tubs where it takes 2/3 men to move them!! LOL!:rolleyespink:

At present they are getting a real battering from the winds that we are suffering at present here in the UK, and its turned a bit colder after a lovely warm spell, so fingers crossed that the weather will turn back to summer soon, and we personally haven't had any rain for weeks now.:prayer1:

All I can do this summer is to care for the plants, have about another 30 or so different plants in tubs all waiting to find a permanent home in the garden eventually, but for the next year the house takes precidence. We are totally renovating it from top to bottom, giving it another bedroom and ensuite on the first floor, with a wonderful decked balcony overlooking the superb view of the Solent which will be so lovely to wake up to, and enlarging the lounge and kitchen also at the back of the house to give us more space and light. You can tell my enthusiasm already can't you!

The first priority is to build a garage in order to rid the house of the walls of storage boxes in the spare bedroom which come from the back wall to the door in the hall, you cannot even step inside that room at all. Wherever we look at present there are storage boxes, but one day soon in the next year or so, they will all be unpacked and reclaim their rightful place in our new home.

I have never heard of the Emerald Ash Borer that you mention and I will definitely look it up on the web, and I really hope that you manage to get rid of it, losing trees is like losing someone dear to you, and I love each and every one of ours, each tells a story and has a memory attached, and we lost two precious acers last winter and I really cried! One we had had for 30 years!!

Please keep in touch on how you are going with the trees and the pest , its lovely to "talk" to fellow gardeners and see how wonderful God is with the plants he has enriched our lives with, especially ours.

More later...............

 

[Josephine]

Aretha, I have had an acer for some years in a pot but it always struggled to thrive because I kept forgetting to water it! How on earth do you keep up with watering all your acers? Do you have an irrigation system installed?

Just a couple of months ago, I planted my acer in the garden and it's absolutely raced away. I didn't know about the need for ericaceous soil but it seems to be doing well thus far as you can see here

 

[aretha]

Jo, the acer looks fine, and I do know that they survive in neutral soil too, but that they do not like chalky, clay soil, and if planted in that sort of soil then they would need regular feeding with ericaceous feed once a month perhaps. Mine are planted in tubs in ericaeous soil, and I do feed them once every 2 months in the summer months.

Do I have a watering system, yes its me!!!:biggrin:. I do water them every 2/3 days throughout the summer. The other day I timed myself and it took me nearly 2 hours to water the back garden and then the front garden. I really don't mind this, I find it very therapeutic, time to reflect also, and if I didn't enjoy it so much, then a watering system would be the way to go! We did have a seep hose around the herbaceous borders in our last home, which we turned on some nights overnight, but it didn't water the tubs, so I was still doing this by hand. And NO, we are not on a water meter - yet!!!:secretaea:

Acers like their roots damp, but in free draining soil, so I guess what I have been doing all these years has worked as most of them are great. The two we lost last winter were due to the snow, it was very heavy, very wet as it melted, resulting in the roots getting too wet and too cold for too long!!

Jo, your garden looks great, and if the acer is doing well, I would say that it is happy with the soil, I would however, give it a drink in extremely dry weather sometimes. The only reason we haven't planted ours is that the soil was poor where we were, and here it is very chalky so I am thinking alkaline soil, and keeping them in tubs enable us to control how large they grow, I think they would race away in normal soil, and for us would get too big and block the view we have and want to keep. Our largest is about 7 feet tall and in a pot with a circumference of approx. 36". We don't like to change them too often now as the pots cost so much money to replace, and we have to manhandle them to get them out and in again! On saying that, every Spring, we rake about 2" of old soil from the surface of the pots, and replace with new ericaeous compost, which seems to perk them up a lot.

You are more greenfingered than me when it comes to veggies Jo, I just can't seem to get a handle on them, maybe because I take too much care, and they can probably get along with not a lot of water and be left to their own devices. Am thinking or utilising some of our empty large containers and planting up with runner beans, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and chillies next year, I think its too late this year now,so may be coming back for advice on how to care for them, what soil, etc.

My knee seems to be responding now to going back to aqua several times a week, although I can't say the same for my good knee, but at least 3 stone overweight, so now am concentrating on losing excess weight, and using Sonja as my inspiration too!

Happy gardening Jo.

 

[Josephine]

Oh, I've never considered myself to have green fingers! More luck than good judgement. But it is true that peas and beans seem to get along just fine on their own. I weed and hoe once in a while - perhaps 3-4 times each season! Other than that I just pull the weeds as they appear. Groundsel and another weed I've never been able to name is my chief problem, front and back.

I also have to confess that I have a young man come every two weeks and cut the grass, do some weeding and tidying up. I took him on when I had my knee done and haven't had the heart to dispense with his services since! Besides which, he's a good worker and what he does enables me to look after other things. Times like this just now with the shoulder injury, makes me awfully glad I retained his services! :th_heehee:

 

[davrunner]

Wonderful Acers Aretha, I have 3 and love them. I need to transplant one as it's a dwarf and I planted some ferns around it that decided they were going to grow bigger then advertised and have completely blocked the view of the Acer.
I also have one called a Fireglow that I put in last year and when the sun shines through the leaves it is georgous, looks like fire.