Preparing for the Diamond Jubilee.

This past week I've been concentrating just about all of my efforts on the walled garden preparing it for the Queens Diamond Jubilee party which the village is holding in the walled garden of the big house. One of the main tasks was to plant up the Dahlia borders. The Dahlia's obviously won't be in flower for a few weeks yet but the borders look better with some plants in and it was time to plant them out anyway so this is what I did on what I think were the warmest two days of the year so far so it proved to be quite a draining task, the best part of which was the watering in which saw me giving myself a good watering in at regular intervals. Unlike most of the other planting out to be done shortly all the Dahlia's have to be dug in with a spade so by the time I had finished it was as though I had dug over the whole of the borders.

In the picture below you can see 'The Long Dahlia Border', There are two more borders of Dahlia's in the Memorial Gardens which amount to a similar area as that of 'The Long Border'.

On turning out one of the boxes of Dahlia tubers I discovered the start of a wasps nest in among them which I thought was quite interesting, it's amazing where they choose to make their homes.

Apart from the Dahlia planting there were also a few other various containers to be planted up and a few lurking plants given a home so as to make them look useful instead of just lay-a-bouts hanging around on bench corners.

Because this part of the grounds is not usually open to the public I had to do a few things to try and avoid any accidents, one of which you can see in the picture below. The pots of Geraniums are put there to denote the edge of the steps which might not be obvious to someone not paying attention. I also had to cover the well, removing any low branches over paths so no one gets their eyes poked out and clean off the paths to avoid trips and slips.

The rest of the time was spend weeding and cutting which wasn't all that easy at times because the second part of the week was quite wet but we just about made it.

It was quite hard work at times, it's always hard work but at least having lots of visitors make it all worthwhile.