Probably excessive

My garden and indoor growing projects have expanded beyond my ability to adequately manage them. Plants I have:

• Various nasturtiums
• Cornflowers
• Field Poppies
• Chillis
• Garlics
• Shallots
• Spinach
• About 35 bloody asparagus in three huge troughs
• Eucalyptus bush
• Basil
• Bush basil
• Bergamot
• Sweet peas of various sorts
• Misc bulbs
• Rosemary
• Olive tree
• Lavender tree
• Skimmia japonica (Bronze Knight)
• Violas
• Lonicera
• Euphorbia
• Sedums of red and green
• Thyme - both low-lying and bushy
• Saxifrage
• Two kinds of pieris
• Some kind of Jack Frost thing that is barely alive
• Gro-sure easy flowers - pastel and bright
• Wild flower mix
• Small early fruit bushes - six of these but not all looking like surviving
• Shrub collection - Berberis Thunb, Weigela Rosea, Cornus Alba, Cornus Alba, Forsythia Int. ‘Spectabilis, Philadelphus Coronarius, Potentilla Fruticosa, Ribes Aureum, Spiraea Douglasii, Symphoricarpos Albus, Syringa Vulgaris
• Sambucus 'black lace' - mostly due to a sort of pun on Sam's name
• Acer Palmitum - can't remember the cultivar name but it's pretty
• Planted olive tree seeds to watch
• Pine seeds

And I've probably even forgotten some. This is way out of hand.

Landscapes

I've spent most of the weekend doing more garden sorting. The chaos is gradually giving way and the patio area is no longer strewn with junk:

Apart from the two chairs on the right, they're pretty junky. Just around the corner is where I've moved my storage box and put up a ten-quid ASDA greenhouse thing. Actually quite sturdy, but the shelves are shite.

After that a good part of yesterday was putting excess rubble and soil into bags in preparation for taking the tip. I was out stupidly early this morning filling about fifteen rubble sacks and the last bit of garden was finally taking shape, though that shape was basically a huge mound of crap. I took a break to tend to the other bit of garden by laying some stepping stones:

They are square 'stonewood' railway sleepers. The rest of that is starting to come to life as well;

^^An example of the many germinations.

After that it was back to the main event. We ended up wondering about the best thing to do with the remainder of the garden. A few weeks back we were at Webbs at Wychbold (really excellent garden centre, though is far away in the Midlands) and they had a riverside garden area. We were early and this was open before the shop was so we wandered round it and they had this sort of tiered thing made with those log rolls you can get. So we decided to do it.

I must have moved about a tonne of earth today building this thing, and the ground is a complete bastard - still full of stones. Managed to clear most of it and get down to some half-decent clay-earth stuff to dig the required trenches and ta-da:

Still more to do but that's it so far. The earth in those bits needs levelling out and there's another tier to come. We're going to alternate flowers and lawn and then an ericaceous zone right at the base. Hard work, that. It's a bit.. let's say 'rustic' in finish as I'm not a professional but it'll do.

Also, got some Sweetpeas doing well:

And I probably should have heeded Helen's warning about Nasturtiums:

That's in the rockery. I never planted it, the nasturtiums are now in the front garden and THEY HAVEN'T EVEN FLOWERED YET. God knows how that one got that but I'm going to leave it be, for showing pluck.

A Use for Surplus Technology

A little while ago Barnes and Noble realised that nobody was buying their ereaders and so they went on an aggressive price-cutting spree in an attempt to get people to buy them and then spend money in their ebook shop. Their basic model (Nook Simple Touch) was cut to £29 and as it had physical buttons and an SD slot I impulse-bought one after a rapid lunchtime run to John Lewis.

It's nice enough and all, but the physical buttons aren't really clicky enough for me. Better than nothing, of course, but really a bit of a let-down. As was the B&N shop itself, it's not particularly easy to find much, pretty ropey set of freebies on there and so I ended up not really using it as a book reader - possibly due to already owning two other ereaders. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Of course, that's not the whole story. NO WAY.

You see, it turns out that the Nook Simple Touch runs Android - the famous mobile operating system. One of the defining aspects of this operating system is its openness and ability to be customised fully. This is typically done via 'root' access which grants access to the deeper recesses of the file system and lets you do special stuff (including breaking it but I'm not going to do that).

So, it's runs Android and can be rooted. This required further investigation. Following this guide here:

http://www.babblingengineer.com/how-to/how-i-turned-my-nook-into-an-e-reader-monster/

I installed root access, a fresh launcher to bypass the Nook software and the Google Play Market to get at my Android apps. Basically the process is:

• Download a thing.
• Write an image of that thing onto a microSD card.
• Put card in Nook.
• Boot.
• Press the button which says 'Root'.

In a nutshell. That was all fine and snazzy and fully engaged me for a good chunk of evening but then I put it in my bag and did very little else with it. A couple of weeks later, an idea occurred to me:

WHAT ABOUT MAKING IT INTO A KITCHEN COMPUTER AND FRIDGE AND FREEZER AND OTHER SUPPLIES MONITOR

With wifi connectivity at home and certain Android apps ability to sync with each other I could have it next to the fridge with a list of general supplies which could be ticked off when we need to buy more. Then when we are in a shop we could consult our phones and see what we need to pick up. But then, even better,

WHAT ABOUT MOUNTING IT ON THE FRIDGE WITH MAGNETS

Even better indeed. So, after some reading it looks like 'rare earth' neodymium magnets are the way to go as they are extremely strong for their size. There's not all that many sources for these but the Magnet Expert sells on Amazon and I got these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0022BPXES/ref=pe_217191_31005151_M3T1_dp_1

They are 20x6x1.5mm magnets with a sticky backing. Just the thing for sticking a Nook on the fridge.

They arrived promptly and even had a safety leaflet inside. This also mentioned that you shouldn't let them go to snap together with force, snap and then return them claiming they were broken in the post which seems fair enough.

I first tried to cut a slit into the Nook cover to insert the magnets inside it but I was foiled by the inverse square law - they were too far from the from the surface to have enough pull. So I stuck a load around the outside of it:

You can see that the left edge has two. The inner one is to solve the problem of the crappy case not holding the Nook very well - it flops about. I stuck two magnets to the back of it as a brace and that inner-left magnet provides enough force to keep it more securely stuck. It's also extra force for on the fridge and it sticks very securely now.

That's as far as I've gotten for now. Stay tuned for more.

Garden Adventure - a never-ending tale

Of course, it'd never be as simple as doing a bit of gardening and it being done. No, there's more to do.

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.

It's Finished! Except..

Well, tonight saw a huge amount of activity in the garden. Making good use of the weather and being home a bit early I decided to haul some things about and finish off the right-hand side of the garden. This mainly involved building a rockery.

Not being at all sure how to go about this, I simply piled up rocks in an attempt to look sort of natural and pleasing. I then pushed up to it with my final bag of slate and then planted a shrub in it. It's going to have more plants so it's not strictly finished, but here it is:

There it is, in all its glory. You can probably notice a few Rainbow Cobbles which I'll probably dispense with when it has plants. These work in some places but not in this. Here they are making a path:

That works reasonably. They are bright and shiny.

But to return to the main point; garden is finished:

as long as you don't look a little bit to the left...

Work work.

Partial Progress

I'm making more progress, despite the weather's best attempts. Today I braved the elements to try to lay down a sort of cobble path to extend our old path. The reason for this is pram-related. The pram doesn't fit along the old path so I've put the bamboo border in at a curve to give more space. This has meant that the pram has a load of mud to slosh through - hence, cobble path.

It's not really the ideal solution but should at least keep the worst of it off. First I put down some gravelly soil so it's got something to bite onto and then laid them all out and stamped them into the earth. Naturally, the single bag I bought wasn't quite enough, obviously. SO I bought one more bag, chucked the rest of the cobbles down, tipped out some slate and so on.

After some washing down and scrubbing of path we have:

The back of that bit is going to be a small rockery thing and then it's just a matter of installing a lot of pots etc. *Phew*.

Gardening

This year so far has conspired against me with regards to getting the garden in order. Last year I was only really able to impose a very limited amount of order on the thing, given that it was utterly chaotic. Nevertheless, my ruthless, almost obsessive hunting down of brambles and bamboo finally produced something vaguely workable. By that time, however, the year had near enough run out.

So that left this year - a sort of blank slate (or tabula rasa if you want to be pretentious about it) for me to work on.

First task: KILL THE FRONT GARDEN.
Last year the front garden was the main thing that I had a serious attempt on. The back garden was mainly just clearance - I actually tried to do something with the front. After clearing the excess I turned all the soil over, composted, set up a border with some stone things and planted various bits and pieces including some whole plants and some seeds.

The whole plants sort of survived for the most part, though the ones purchased as 'ground cover' proved a little too effective and drove out the neighbouring heather. The flowers planted survived well and the seeds sprouted some nice poppies and so on. Unfortunately, the latent weeds in the soil I turned over went on a rampage and overran bloody everything. I had some attempts at weeding but with grasses in the mix as well I had no chance.

So this year the plan was to wipe out everything with powerful chemicals, replant and start from scratch. Unfortunately, it kept raining or being crappy weather. Most of the better plant-killers penetrate the leaves of plants and work their way to the roots, destroying the plants metabolism and killing them for good. However, this type gets broken down in soil and will only be taken up by plants carrying out active metabolism. So if it's rainy the stuff gets washed into soil and destroyed and if it's cold or grey the plants don't do very much and the stuff has no effect. This last week has been pretty much the first chance to spray with any hope of being effective. We'll have to see if it's too late to be of much use.

Second task: RIGHT-HAND-SIDE OF BACK GARDEN.
The back garden has been sort of divided into zones. The right-hand side is going to have a border lining it and be covered in broken up slate with pots and planters and so on. This means removing all the stuff that is in the way, making the soil handleable so it can be smoothed off, putting a border in and then laying down the slate.

So so. First thing - massive Buddleia bush has been there for yonks. In the day when it was surrounded by masses of overgrowth it had adopted a strategy of growing up and over and taking on the appearance of a tree. This did mean it took us a long while to identify the thing as we were looking at types of tree, but I digress. The point is that it had to die. I did like it in a way and was sorry to see it go but it just grew like mad and so would have swamped everything.

To get rid of it I initially sawed off all the main branches which left a pretty substantial stump. The stump had sort of grown sideways too before leaping up so it was even fiddlier to deal with. In the end I had to excavate down and down around it, chopping up major roots as I found them to gradually loosen it. I'd done most of them when I discovered a massive, huge taproot going directly underneath it. To get at it I needed to dig down about three feet and even then I couldn't cut into it - it was just too inaccessible and tough. After a long time of heaving and swearing I hit upon the idea of wrecking a chisel on it and was finally able to chop through it to leave a big hole:

Quite difficult to see the contrast on that so just trust me, it's a big hole. And here is my valiant, defeated foe:

Rest in peace you awkward bugger. In preparation we also bought some tree things. There is an olive tree:

which may or may not ever produce olives. Also, a rosemary and lavender:

The ultimate plan is to have lots of herbs and so on.

Once that was done I had to try to level the garden off. The big problem with this, however, is the previous owners having the bright idea of planting a stand of bamboo at the back. They presumably took their panda with them when they left because it'd grown like mad and gotten absolutely everywhere. Last year I dealt with most of it with some chopping and cutting and more swearing but could not clear it all. I hoped that the remainder may have rotted down and be easier to deal with this year - no such luck. The base of it is now quite short bamboo bits sticking out of the soil but below the soil it's a thick, knotted clump of bamboo which is damn near impossible to get through. It's already bent a garden fork. As I don't have a disc cutter or a laser I've decided it can stay there, at least partially. Its growth has formed a sort of mound so I am going to build up a sort of rockery over it to make it look as though the mound is deliberate. Hopefully then it may rot down totally.

Then there was digging down along the path to put these wooden edging things in - they are made of dead bamboo. The only good bamboo. That was hard work in itself as digging down inevitably led me to great clumps of cement that needed chiselling as well as buried house bricks. Got there in the end though.

So then it was just a case of covering the soil with slate. Firstly I laid down some weed sheeting stuff, augmented by the canvas covering off a crappy wardrobe thing. Then; slate. We bought about three bags to see how far it would go - the answer was "not very far". Then bought some more. Still not far enough. Now we have some more and I think it's going to be enough now. Bleeding hope so.

This weekend should see the completion of the right-hand-side. Then it's the madness of the left.