Garden - Spring 2024 - Part 1
As promised, let’s take a break from heavy topics. We can chill out in the garden. (This post is pure indulgence.)
If you have been reading here for a while, you’ve seen how our garden began and how we have changed it from bare grass with two hydrangeas and nothing else.
The gabion wall we built in 2020 is the anchor feature of our back garden. Although we made a small front flowerbed earlier, the gabion project is when we got serious about transforming our garden. Here is how it looks now. The smudges of color on the patio are remnants of chalk art from a visit by a couple of niblings. (Rain washed away the artwork.) You can glimpse sleek Zola and fluffy Bertie playing between the greenhouse and the gabion.
The gabion wall is great. We are never doing another project like that again. If we had known how much work it would take, we would have done something else. I have to admit the garden would be poorer without it.
But let’s go around to the front to start this spring’s tour. That’s where we made this year’s addition to the garden.
Front Garden
You may remember our front flowerbed has something in bloom almost all the time from crocuses in February until September or October. It was at its most glorious last month when the purple irises bloomed. They’ve gone over now, but here is how they looked. We haven’t cleaned up that flower bed yet.
Our dwarf fruit trees in front are all okay so far. That’s a relief. At the end of last growing season the golden gage looked like it might die, but it has recovered nicely. Contention with ants and their aphids has begun. Last year the ants won, damaging some of the trees. To our delight, we have seen a few ladybirds (ladybugs) of the type for which we bought larvae last year. We are happy a few of them survived, honored that they stayed, and hope they will stuff themselves with aphids.
We participate in No Mow May, so our front lawn is currently a wildflower meadow. When the wildflowers fade and aren’t useful for pollinators any more, I will mow. We still are not seeing nearly as many pollinators as last year.
We didn’t plant annual flowers around the orchard trees this year. Instead, my wife planted some flower bulbs last autumn. Most of them came up and bloomed, mainly very early in the season. It will take time for them to become well enough established to show up the way she wants. The garden insists we must be patient.
Last month I did some digging. Our main change in the garden so far this year is creation of what I call the blueberry bed for want of a better name. It’s a strip in front of our front fence around the blueberry bushes and one of the hydrangeas. Although it looks like nice soil, it isn’t. The soil is mostly clay. I spread a thin layer of compost on top to smooth it and finished it with shredded bark mulch.
At the back we planted Black Magic F1 sunflowers with cardboard loo roll (toilet paper) cores around them for a little protection until they are stronger. They are supposed to grow to about four feet tall and have deep maroon flowers instead of yellow. They get full sun all afternoon and should look dramatic with the fence behind them.
The rest of what we have there is a hodgepodge of lobelia, violas, pansies (exuberantly grateful to be rescued from half-dead on clearance), yellow squash, French dwarf beans (nitrogen fixing to improve the dreadful clay), one snack cucumber plant, a few self-blanching celery plants, and spring onions (red on the bottom instead of white, hopefully a tad undesirable for some of our garden pests).
Back Garden
Most of our efforts go into the back garden. This morning shortly after I got up, this is how the upper back garden looked, including light reflected onto it from house windows. The upper back garden is bathed in sunlight most of the day. It’s only in shadow here because the sun isn’t above the houses yet. The stone circles are ideally placed for sunbathing if that’s what you’re into.
Upon entering the south end of the patio from the side gate or from the utility room, the fernery my wife created greets you by the steps up onto the south end of the back garden. It is more lush each year despite our dogs’ efforts to trash it (especially Bertie, who digs in it when we aren’t looking).
In terms of plants and decorations, the garden is generally my wife’s domain. I mow, build, do some of the painting, and so on. I don’t want another project like last year’s. I still have a couple of aches from it. But there is always something to be done. My plants in the back garden are limited to the strawberry planter and balcony boxes.
The big storage box tucked behind the fernery and dwarf cherry tree holds patio chairs in the off season when we aren’t using the patio much for eating dinner, sharing tea with visitors, chalk artwork, and so on. We also have a small fire pit to take the chill off when it’s slightly cool on the patio, although we have never used it.
Unfortunately, the exterior grade plywood lid is disintegrating after only a couple of years. This year’s garden hilarity is me trying to replace it. I got tongue in groove wood to glue together and screw onto braces to make a new top that I hope will survive better with help from the special paint we use on outdoor furniture.
I don’t have a worktop or clamps to do this project properly. It became a complete mess. Glue everywhere, boards not staying the way I want them, lots of swearing… To pour salt in the wound, the very last board is slightly warped. I can make this turn out usable, but it certainly isn’t coming together as neatly as I planned.
That isn’t a chill-out topic, so let’s move on.
Our veggie bed was being taken over by a rosemary plant. My wife rooted cuttings from it and gave the giant away to a friend who has much more space for it. The bare patch is where the big rosemary plant was. The cuttings will make sure it doesn’t stay that way.
We have runner beans to climb the trellis. Sweet peas will go in soon to grow up the tipi. Lemon balm and mint already need to be harvested, dried and put away. (Those together make a delicious, refreshing, soothing tea.) We also have a few other things such as chives and spring onions here. What we can grow in the veggie patch is severely limited by our thriving slug population.
I’m overdue to put a cat flap in the front fence as a hedgehog door to invite the hedgehog family across the street here to feast on our slugs.
To avoid overwhelming your email with too enormous a post, I’ll pause the garden tour here today. The next garden installment (which might be this week or next week) will take up where this installment stops. It will include last year’s main garden project now that plantings there are more mature.
The photo of Black Magic sunflower blooms is from the DT Brown Seeds UK catalog where we ordered the seeds. All other photos in this post are mine, copyright 2024 Bonnie D. Huval.
p.s. I like the Black Magic sunflowers. I wonder if you considered a patch of black flowers (like goth forensic scientist Abby on NCIS who loves bouquets of all-black flowers). That would be a most unusual part of the garden!
As usual, I do enjoy your garden's transformation. I just started writing in my blog again after three years of laying fallow, because I wanted to share my gardening journey. There's just something about our gardens that reflect our souls, I think. Gardening is hard, sweaty work. I, too, have a "never again" project (not killing spawn-of-Satan Bermuda grass before tilling it in to plant native buffalo grass.) I admire formal gardens, but since most of mine is grown from seed (which was part of a planned layout) that got tossed by wind and gullywashers, it is more like a wild prairie jungle. My son said it sounds like a British cottage garden. I think even cottage gardens are more well-planned. Next year I'll get the courage to pull desirable plants growing in the wrong places. I'll send you the link to my blog via email. Our gardens couldn't be more different, but it's fun reading about the journey. Yours is beautiful and looks very peaceful. Congratulations to you ahd Vicky!