Geranium Planting.

Today I spent most of my day in what we call the courtyard although strictly speaking it is actually the old stable yard which long ago would most likely have been home to the horses and carriages.

I started with a general tidy up of the center area which involved the usual weeding forking and edging type thing. I have some Pelargonium Geraniums and an ornamental Banana plant to go in the center bed when the weather warms up. 

To finish off I did a little planting job around the wall bottom. At the far end of this wall there is a Geranium, not the Pelargonium sort that I have for the center bed but the hardy perennial kind. Anyway last Autumn I split it much the same as I did with the crown bud cuttings on the Delphinium except the cuttings were shoots rather than just buds. These have been grown on over winter and are now able to be planted out. As you can see you can soon have a lot of plants from just one mother plant. In fact what you see here is just a fraction of the plant. Since planting these I have taken as many more cuttings again which I intend to use to reduce the spacing between these plants, and there is still quite a big plant left at the end of the wall.

 The frustrating thing for me is that no one ever sees this sort of work or the savings. All anyone ever seems to talk about is grass cutting and the things one doesn't do. It's that time of year where everyone is making comments about lawn mowing as though I have suddenly got something to do after sitting around twiddling my thumbs all winter.

Dahlia Planting

Since returning to work after my extended Easter holiday I have been planting up Dahlia beds. The weather has turned quite cold here so as it's a job that involves some digging it's proving to be quite beneficial, especially as the soil is also dry and working well.

Below is a picture of one of the Memorial Garden beds with the tubers set out ready for planting. If you are planting a whole bed with a limited number of plants it's best to set them out first so as to get an even spacing They are planted in staggered rows but once they get going they soon become a single mass and even when planted that far from the edge of the lawn they will eventually grow up to the edge. So as you can see from that it's good to give them plenty of room, especially if you are planting large tubers. If you click on the (Memorial Gardens) label you will see what I mean.

Before placing the tubers I also give the ground a dressing of general purpose fertiliser which then gets worked in to the soil as you do the planting work. To finish off the job I went round the borders with the edging shears which I always think is a worthwhile thing to do if you like it nice and tidy looking.

Barn Wall Pruning Work.

Today we have been doing some pruning work along the barn wall and border. This is work that continues on from the tree pruning that we did last week.

First job was to tidy up the Ivy on the wall to the steps. The Ivy is under control so it was just a matter of trimming the side and then taking back last years growth. I don't know if you can see in the picture but there are some nice wrought iron rails above the Ivy.  

I think it makes quite a difference to the look of the place once done.

As we move along the wall there are some Dogwoods and a Pyracantha that need pruning. There are several other shrubs as well but they can't be pruned just yet as it would cut off this years flowers.

I just cut the Dogwoods back to last years cut and removed any dead or weak growth. The Pyracantha has to have a degree of training as well as a prune. There are a couple of interesting features in the wall that I don't want to cover so it has to be trained to the wall but around the obstacles. 

This year I added a loop around the statue in the wall, I think you can just make it out if you look close. I now need to get a shoot growing off to the left of that loop to balance things out. Also in this picture you can see a Euonymus to the left of the Pyracantha, this was also given a bit of a trim. As you can see I still have the Dogwood prunings to pick up and cart away as I ran out of time. The Euonymus can be grown as a shrub but as there isn't enough room for that I've trained it to grow flat against the wall. The chunk that's missing out of the left hand side is where some non gardening person decided to install a bird box. I expect it will fill in again with time.

Pruning Afternoon

This afternoon we had a bit of a pruning session in one of the shrub borders. I say pruning but it was a bit of a mixture of proper pruning with some clipping. I prefer to prune for a more natural look but some of the shrubs such as the Berbris lend them selves to clipping where as the buddleia's get a proper pruning. We finished off by putting everything through the shredder and returned it back to the border It was a nice day for it, dry and quite warm in the sunshine.

Below are a couple of before and after pictures.

Restoring The Balance.

 We had cause to try and save this tree recently. It got pulled over by the weight of the snow that we had a few weeks back. It was virtually blocking the entrance to the wedding barn so if I could if I couldn't get it back under control it was going to have to be removed which would have been a shame.

Thankfully I was able to save it and at the same time keep it looking respectable.

This is a side view before the work began. Apart from blocking the doorway it was also covering a border.

This is the same side view after the work was done. People can once again walk under it without having to duck or bang their heads.

This the view from the other side and gives a better idea of how far it came away from the wall.

Here is the finished article. It's still away from the wall but I've managed to get a certain balance to it so that hopefully it will reestablish it's self with time.

 I've managed to get a bit more work done on the graves in the churchyard. This first picture is a reminder of as it was like shortly after I started back in February. At the very beginning there was also Ivy covering both the gravestones as well as the ground.

This is how it was after the initial clearing and after I removed the Ivy from the graves and went over the surrounding area with the brush cutter.

This next picture shows the work I did lastly on the next four graves. The Ivy had climbed the sides and was starting to grow over the top so I removed it from top and sides plus underneath which was the most difficult part as I couldn't get to it very easily. As you can see in the foreground the original graves are now cleared. I'm undecided whether to put in a little plant, maybe a primula or similar but would that be overstepping the mark as the graves are nothing to do with me.

Here are the last four graves I cleared looking from the other end. You can see some of the Ivy I had to remove from them.

Scotts Pine & Noble Fir.

One of our jobs this past week has been to pot on these Scotts Pine trees. I bought them in last year as bare rooted plants and the boss wants them growing on to make bigger plants for planting out in the woods at some point.

After buying in the trees last year it inspired me to have a go at growing some from seed so a few weeks ago I sowed a packet of Scots Pine and Noble Fir seeds. The Scotts Pine are in the half of the tray nearest and as you can see they have germinated very well. The Noble Fir are proving to be quite a lot slower, it looks like I might get a few plants from them eventually. For those that don't know the Noble Fir is often what you are getting when you buy your no drop Christmas trees.

Crown Bud Cutting Spring Growth.

Today I thought I would give you an update on the Delphinium crown bud cuttings that I took last July. There hasn't been anything to see over the winter as all the leaves died back but this past week or so they are showing signs of life again. In the next few weeks I will be looking to pot them up to a bigger pot. If you didn't see the original posts when I made them, go and take a look either by following the labels to this post or click [HERE]

Something Different.

Today I thought I would post something a bit different to the usual gardening things. I took these during our daily walk around. I like to make sure things are in order and no one has been up to any monkey business.

Below is the head gardener checking out the snowdrops by the woodland walk, no doubt whilst keeping an eye out for squirrels also.

This building in amonst the trees is the old water pumping station, it's no longer in use and is slowly decaying with time.

Bird Box Terrace

Yesterday we moved some of the Dahlia tubers from being stored in the potting shed to the conservatory in the hope that if I keep dampening them with water on warmer days they will start to put out shoots so they get a head start once planted in the garden. A bit like spritting seed Potatoes I suppose.

The ones below are called Border Princess and will be going back into the Memorial Gardens borders.

Also yesterday, as I was supposed to be taking it easy I put up a bird box. It's been waiting around in the potting shed for a couple of years so I thought it was time it did a bit of good somewhere. I don't really know much about birds so not sure if it's in a good place or not. I read that some birds like to fly straight into the box whereas others prefer to perch and look around first  so I've tried to accommodate both here because apart from the hole that you can see in the middle there is also one at either end which in my book makes it a terraced bird box. Anyway I will keep an eye on it and see how it goes. I think there are probably a lot of better places to nest around here to be honest.