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The gardening thread





always get to grips with the pots near easter weekend...lovely, dry , sunny afternoon titivating about with tea and a trowel.

eta and loving the smell of the mexican orange blosson wafting around.
 
I'm in sunny london - hardly anything died this winter, osteospurnhams and geraniums that'd normally keel over at the first frost, battled through. The orange ones i bought on a stall last week....can't remember what the purple shrub is, not the lavender - but it has really kept it's colour, loving it.

I need some climbers for a back fence - it is south facing and bakes most of the day. ideally they'd be evergreen, flowering, hardy, fragrant and not clematis ( i can kill them at twenty paces. :( )
They'll be going into big terracotta pots and will have trellis behind them...is it ok to put more than one climber into a pot? Any ideas on spectacular things I can't destroy.?
I had a gorgeous acid green jasmine Fiona Sunrise, but after about ten years it just pegged out.
 
I'm obsessed with fragrance, but I struggle to accommodate a fragrant climber.

I have passionflower which will only get cut back every decade or so (let's hope the last few winters were just an aberration), (if you can keep geraniums alive, perhaps you could grow one of the fancier cultivars ... but they're unkillable (in the ground where they can survive as roots and pop up in unexpected places) but are a doddle to root from cuttings in any case...

Virginia creeper is conveniently eating my whole hovel, but is only now coming into leaf.. and I have a golden hop which is only now taking off, but is a proper triffid ...

I aim to have a succession of other plants to provide fragrance - sweet peas, datura, tobacco, lilies, stock, bulbs ...

Sadly with all those to accomodate, mine is mainly a summer and autumn garden and I don't have room for the sort of plants that would provide winter interest.
 
Oh well .....
Even though my jungle garden behind the greenhouse is now shaded by the spreading bamboo, I can't resist that lovely patch of soil (lots of spent compost and bamboo leaf mould) so my plan is to plant "Las tres hermanas" (three sisters) (corn, beans and squash).
So more seeds .. the ones I have are not going to sprout after 4 years...

lastreshermanas.jpg

I will have to resist buying some fish and asking the fishmonger for extra guts to use as fertiliser. :D
 
The skip has finally gone from the front.

This will not do at all... :(


21ju3bm.jpg


So I cleared, cleaned and finally planted the palm in the ground...

14cz8lk.jpg




and then....Multi-barrows and multi-spreading

2hr2v5z.jpg


*punches air :)

Bonus pic of my MASSIVE calla Lillies that are thriving! :cool:

wre79y.jpg
 
I absolutely love before and after pics Rutita1.
A good day's work there :)

I've planted out some broad beans and turned & raked more of the veg plot so far this weekend.
Radish, beetroot & carrot to sowed in there tomorrow.

I've also planted out a couple of delphiniums and some hellebores that a work colleague gave me.
 
I now realise I probably want to do something surreal with my "three sisters" - so it'll probably be next year - you can get maize that grows to 20-something feet !
I might try it with giant sunflowers this year ..:hmm:
 
clicker said:
I'm in sunny london - hardly anything died this winter, osteospurnhams and geraniums that'd normally keel over at the first frost, battled through. The orange ones i bought on a stall last week....can't remember what the purple shrub is, not the lavender - but it has really kept it's colour, loving it.

I need some climbers for a back fence - it is south facing and bakes most of the day. ideally they'd be evergreen, flowering, hardy, fragrant and not clematis ( i can kill them at twenty paces. :( )
They'll be going into big terracotta pots and will have trellis behind them...is it ok to put more than one climber into a pot? Any ideas on spectacular things I can't destroy.?
I had a gorgeous acid green jasmine Fiona Sunrise, but after about ten years it just pegged out.
Click to expand...
Honeysuckles are great- there are some evergreen versions. Star or winter jasmine. Akebia (spelling?) - look up chocolate vine.... If the pot is big I reckon you're ok to double up, except honeysuckle- ime they are better alone.
 
I'm gradually getting mine into shape - cleared the collection of bags of compost from the bed behind the tree fern where there will be a row of giant tobacco, taken all the bags of topsoil down the end of the garden.

tidier.jpg

That's my focal point colour layout from now on -white on the left, blue on the right and hot at the back.
I'm going to run out of white soon, so I'll have to find something at the garden centre - perhaps some fancy daisies ...

I have no idea how that pampas at the far end is doing so well - some sort of wildlife has excavated under it in a big way. I'll see if I can get some fertiliser into it somehow so I get a better show of pink flowers.
While I was cleaning up the end of the garden, I was careful to leave the animal trails clear - hopefully my hedgehog is still down there somewhere - probably in a hole left by the badger -
The huge mound of bamboo prunings I started piling down there on the left in 2010 is now lovely leaf-mould - albeit it would need sieving - but I'll leave it there for the wildlife.
The black fabric-covered mound at the back of the greenhouse is me trying to smother the remnants of the original bamboo planting. I suspect I will end up sitting down there with a pair of pruners - if it wasn't for the greenhouse, I would build a fire in the middle of it.
 
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Started the left hand side of the garden.... The boundary actually belongs to our neighbour, but it's falling to pieces and he isn't going to sort it (he rents it out) so job #1 is to fence it
6era3uqe.jpg
egejazeg.jpg
yzu9ema2.jpg


First time I've installed a fence- bloody hard work, especially digging post holes in London clay thick with tree roots.

I've also dig out and old tree stump, and started digging the foundations for the patio on that back corner and the flowerbed retaining walls. Skip arriving when we get back from holiday, then I think it'll suddenly start coming together and looking like a garden.

Still got the outside loo to come down- an going to have to get someone to do it as it's properly built and I am just not strong enough :(
 
Are you sure about the outside loo ?
The first winter in my house I quickly realised the outside loo might have given useful insulation to my kitchen wall - which is why I built my potting shed (unfinished folly)

Lime mortar comes apart easily - just dismantle from the roof downwards. :)
 
gentlegreen said:
Are you sure about the outside loo ?
The first winter in my house I quickly realised the outside loo might have given useful insulation to my kitchen wall - which is why I built my potting shed (unfinished folly)

Lime mortar comes apart easily - just dismantle from the roof downwards. :)
Click to expand...
its not attached to the house, its down a path, and is in the sunniest part of the garden. The terrace needs to be there!

I've tried- Its bloody impossible. Its double skinned and if you hit it, it just absorbs the force of the blow...
 
A double-skinned outside loo !
That's really unusual.
Perhaps it was built partly as a bomb shelter. ;)
Have you taken the roof off ?
 
gentlegreen said:
A double-skinned outside loo !
That's really unusual.
Perhaps it was built partly as a bomb shelter. ;)
Have you taken the roof off ?
Click to expand...
Yeah, and door frame out. I think it's more solid than the house....!
hudepuju.jpg

You can see the slightly battered corner. That took 20 minutes....!
 
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My sister's 1930s ex-council house was like that - the bricks broke before the mortar - and they were proper bricks.
My hovel is built from little more than lumps of lightly-toasted clay sitting on crumbly grey stuff.
 
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Manter said:
Started the left hand side of the garden.... The boundary actually belongs to our neighbour, but it's falling to pieces and he isn't going to sort it (he rents it out) so job #1 is to fence it
6era3uqe.jpg
egejazeg.jpg
yzu9ema2.jpg


First time I've installed a fence- bloody hard work, especially digging post holes in London clay thick with tree roots.

I've also dig out and old tree stump, and started digging the foundations for the patio on that back corner and the flowerbed retaining walls. Skip arriving when we get back from holiday, then I think it'll suddenly start coming together and looking like a garden.

Still got the outside loo to come down- an going to have to get someone to do it as it's properly built and I am just not strong enough :(
Click to expand...

Amazing work there Manter! :cool: A while back I was doing the opposite of this by knocking out/digging up fence posts...I hated them by the time I had finished! :D

Shame about the placement of the out building...could have been ace to use it/repurpose it in some way. Why not knock half down and build a barbeque? :hmm:
 
I wish you'd done my neighbour's fence last summer - I hope my new neighbour fixes it soon so I can take the prop down.
My own fence on the other side is held together with bamboo and Virginia creeper - if the neighbour wants me to fix it, we'd have to get the materials through his house and do it from his side - but he's in Thailand.
 
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Manter said:
Yeah, and door frame out. I think it's more solid than the house....!
You can see the slightly battered corner. That took 20 minutes....!
Click to expand...
Bloody hell !
Even if you were able to lever the thing apart, it's not going to break into small bits.
I would suggest a car bottle jack driving through fence posts at the top.
Slow leverage rather than bashing it.
 
Manter said:
Yeah, and door frame out. I think it's more solid than the house....!
hudepuju.jpg

You can see the slightly battered corner. That took 20 minutes....!
Click to expand...

20 ton bottle jack (or two!) between the walls at the bottom will have it down in minutes.
 
gentlegreen said:
Bloody hell !
Even if you were able to lever the thing apart, it's not going to break into small bits.
I would suggest a car bottle jack
Click to expand...
I reckon you could drop a bomb on it and it'd stay standing. The coal shed behind it came down really easily....
 
Manter said:
Needs to come this way not the other way- neighbour has paved behind it. I've got a builder lined up to do whatever builders do- I've damn near busted a shoulder on it already!
Click to expand...
So a serious diamond saw then ...

... and good 3rd party insurance.

Is the intention to leave the party wall standing ?
I wonder if that's a good idea from a structural point of view ...
 
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I'm seeking advice about hedges please. It's for out the front of a terraced house and to be used as a screen to give the lounge some privacy. 2 years ago I bought at great expense lavender bushes that were meant to grow tall and smell good but didn't and over a year died. So how do I go about buying a non fancy hedge and planting it please?
 
In our proper garden we repaired the plastic roof on our pagoda thing. It came with the house but we put the roof on which means we have been able to eat etc in warm but wet weather. We had a section not nailed down which came off in the winter but our neighbours are away so we were able to go into their garden to fix it. Though we could have done that with the neighbours here too.
 
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