Today I've been trying to clean out the gap between our extension and our garden. The garden as a whole is effectively on a huge 'raised bed' that it about five foot higher than the house. The extension was built to approach this but with about a 75cm gap. ie; too large to ignore completely, too small to be genuinely useful. During the tidying up of the rest of the garden this became full of crap like mud, bags, gravel, bramble root-nodes flung away in fury. Enoiugh organic matter had gathered down there to become true soil and it's been a bastard to clear. I tried some today by sort of sweeping and spraying with the hose but to minimal effect. Lots of it is flowing into great big holes into the underneath of the house. This needs patching up but that's a job for another day. I've given up on tidying this nook for the moment.
The rest of the garden is coming along though. The upper left area (zone 2 as dubbed on my sketched garden plan) has gotten a bamboo border put in and has been trawled, turned over, raked, picked over and all sorts. I've removed a ton of stone from there but lots remains. I decided that good enough is good enough and began planting:
This first involved an Asda bag of bulbs from last year, half of which were mush and the other half probably killed off by the winter spent outside in my storage box. Then some random sweet pea seeds went into the earth, a pack of 'wildflowers' and a load of GrowSure 'Easy Flowers'. These are big bags of flower seeds mixed in with feed and compost etc that you can throw about and hope they grow. I suspect they will be special infertile versions to stop me harvesting seeds from them for next year, but we'll see.
Over on the left there you can see Rockery 2. I decided that a way to use up the even greather quantity of loose stone would be to have a second rockery. This also breaks up that bit of garden, smooths out the gradients and hides a pointless step. It has been planted with a mix of things.
The crowning glory is this euphorbia something or other. It's tall and has interesting leaves:
Two pieris things - silver flame (top) and little heath (other). One was bought because of the excellent leaves and the other due to buy-one-get-one-free:
I can't really remember what this one is called but it's 'Jack Frost' as a subtype:
Not that the rest of the garden is being totally ignored. The right-hand-side (zone 1) has had things happen and now looks like this:
That probably represents its final state. Rockery, some tubs, slate. The rockery has some new additions:
Above is a skimmia japonica 'Bronze Knight', sitting proudly at the top of the whole thing:
The one on the left could probably use some careful pruning. A bit of other stuff is provided by these:
One is a saxifrage, one a thyme variant and one a black viola.
I think the path needs some work:
It's ended up messy due to the poor seating of cobbles and the gravel. I'm going to have to bite the bullet and mortar them down, do it properly.
Other tubs include;
Garlic!
Nasturtiums and cornflowers!
Cayenne!
Oh and I put some stones on some trees/herbs to keep water in. There's some bark too which I was worried about using due to soil depletion but it'll come good in the end.
Finally:
Some more sweet peas planted from seed and some cuttings that have been soaked, dipped in rooting gel and planted. These were mostly gathered from parks and so on. See if any of them work..
And now I am sore and tired.
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