Karmacat's Journal

I’ve worked in the back garden for well over two hours the last few days:
(1) clearing up after the neighbour’s chopping down all those overhanging leylandii.
(2) the first digging! I dug over about a square yard of the shady area where I hope to create a seating space, which was great, and wasn’t actually too bad.
(3) unthreaded some bindweed off the lavender – the lavender desperately needs pruning, tho I’ve no idea when it should be done.
(4) more general pulling away of annual weeds and stuffing them in rubbish bags.
(5) cutting back shrubs – at the back, on the shady bit, and at the front of this garden on the litte terraces too. I’ve realised that thats especially important on the terraces. They can be seen from the house, very easily, they’ve got a weed in them thats already lifted up several paving stones, and since the terrace walls aren’t keyed in to the boundary wall (!!!) I have to get shut of it pronto, or that terrace is going to end up falling down, quite simply. I’m working on it.

I was out taking photos of work I’ve done recently just this morning – my beloved American cousin in New Jersey hadn’t quite realised how overgrown it all was, and I think I’ve horrified her now. What I’ve done this week is clip the overgrowth around the bases of the handrail supports – the handrail needs to be painted this year, and I’ve cleared 3 of them. The fourth not only has little bits of growth around it, it has huge great branches growing over it. Still a bit of work to be done – but not too bad, on the whole, its looking like it could be rescued now.

He’s cutting it down! He didn’t plant it, but he’s never trimmed it – he tried, last year, but did it with a chain saw and almost lost 3 fingers on one hand.

Now he’s recovered, he’s gone at them again with a manual saw, bless him, and a huge chunk of my garden has sun that hasn’t had it for years! Plus I’ll be able to cut back some shrubs that have got as badly out of hand – it never seemed to make much difference, because I had this gloomy wall overhanging my whole garden, cutting the sun out after about 3pm. Now, its still sunny! Things will grow, not just undergrowth, but plants I plant!

Says it, really! I’ve also cleared the overgrown cotoneaster around one of the supports of the handrail, since the whole structure needs to be sanded and painted, its going a little bit rusty.

I’ve also created a bit more space between the two overgrown bits, its definitely looking a bit better.

Spent about three quarters of an hour at the back through the last two days, doing the same as usual – pulling weeds and seeds out, chopping bits up for the rubbish.

Blissfully, however, I also did a few minutes of unthreading-the-bindweed(?)-from-the-lavender, which is what I did last year. It wasn’t really blissful, but it was getting back to where I was last year. I’m afraid, however, that that’ll be the limit. There’s still quite a steep slope behind those lavender, and I just can’t see myself working on that until the autumn, when the foliage of the weeds dies down.

There will be so, so much work to do to get the ground I’m currently working on cleared. I’ve currently managed to clear almost all the weed foliage from the top third – I’m ready to start digging again on that bit, and it won’t actually take too long, as long as there’s been a bit of rain – thats the bit thats been dug over twice in the last year. Path is definitely clear, and I’m also clearing the other side – that has two or three inches of soil thats developed over carpet I laid down as mulch years ago. And its also heavily shaded by a sycamore from next door – I need to be brave and get up a ladder to saw some branches off, but I need somebody to stand on the bottom of the ladder first.

I’m just keeping on going!

Spent half an hour this afternoon doing some more clearing away of the front path – I’ve trained the cotoneaster to grow up the vertical part of the steps, but of course it gets unruly and pushes over the top, so I spend quite a lot of time pruning it.

I obviously haven’t been pruning the very top carefully enough. I’ve been seeing little bits of mortar on the ground recently, beneath the kitchen window, and thought it was leftover from the replacement windows I had fitted recently, or dropped by birds or something (I get quite a few moss clumps suddenly appearing, which I think nesting birds have tried to transport and found it a bit much. Anyway…)

As I was cutting back the cotoneaster a little bit, and trimming the extremely intrusive ivy I have, I suddenly found a second ants’ nest. There is the huge one in the middle of the garden, the one thats dislodged 3 stones; it turns out there’s another one, which has started to dislodge a part of the front step – I saw it getting a bit wonky, thought it was just getting disturbed by a bit of plant root. No such luck, its the genuine article of ants nesting. I brushed the soil of the steps – felt bad, because there’s a lot of young ants obviously ready to fly soon.

I don’t want to kill them, but nor do I want them to continue to cause damage to my property, so they’ll have to be controlled.

And the other thing I’ll have to do is not let any plants grow in the crease between the wall of the house and the surrounding surfaces, I never realised why people don’t like it. I don’t like it either now..

EDIT: I was out there for another good half hour in the evening, snipping away at the plants that have grown around the base of the stanchion for the handrail, the one thats nearest the house, then sweeping away the above-the-surface ants nest. Then sweeping the slabs nearest the house, and cutting back the little shoots of ivy that are trying to get up the house wall – I have no intention of this work encouraging the ants into the house.

Out there again last night for about 45 minutes – still not doing any digging, embarrassingly enough, just pulling up lightly rooted plants and dead grass with my bare hands. I made enough progress so that I managed to make contact with the lavenders I planted last year, which are huge, but have been hidden beneath weeds till now.

And when I think last year, every fortnight or so I’d painstakingly go through them and unthread the bindweed that was trying to take hold….

Well anyway, I’ve found them again. The ground below them, where I’ve been working, is still looking quite bare once I take off the light stuff as above – I think the annual weeds have grown so quickly on it, no perennials have had a chance to take root! But now, of course, this year’s annuals have laid their seeds, I can see dozens laying on the ground. Not quite sure how that will pan out.

When my commitments are a little less frantic, I’m going to take a good look around this site, but just don’t have the time right now. Really looking forward to it tho.

Again, I’ve worked in the front garden twice this week, clipping things back – ivy and snowberries mainly, as well as clearing the dead ox-eye daisy stalks.

I’ve discovered quite how big the ants nest in the middle of the front garden has become – I’ll need to channel it a little bit, cos they’ve actually knocked 3 stones off one of the terrace wall over the years, and I can’t allow that to go on.

It looks like it has a bit more texture now, at least – it was a solid wall of snowberries, towering about 20 feet over the pavement, which was looking really unacceptable. Now, there’s a gap of a couple of feet, through which the kitchen window is now almost visible. The old lavender, very big, is now much more visible, as is some self seeded herbs. Every single terrace is just that, an isolated terrace, and I could very easily let the ground cover be one sort of invasive herb – maybe on the top layer, I could let mint and horseradish fight each other?

As long as I keep going, and eventually start planting more, it’ll be fine in the end. Oh, what I must also do is arrange where I’m going to stand when I stand on the lowest level: I stood on the edge of my beautiful little sedum thats seeded, and that simply won’t do.

Been out at the back twice this week, three quarters of an hour or so right up at the back – found a batch of corks I’d put up there to arrange artfully in the barkchips.

Today, I was working on the patio, nearest the house, and the little terraces that are right by it – still not digging them with a handtrowel or anything normal like that, but pulling back the stuff out with my hands, and also clipping some rubbish to put it in the bin. Couple of hours good work.

Managed to put in half an hour yesterday on the back garden, just before Doctor Who. And I made a proper start on the beginning of the path to the top third of the garden, and started to clear away some of the weeds infesting the garden itself. They’ve all set seed, and there’s a lot of weed seeds lying on the ground – I’m going to try to pick them up before it rains and they have a chance to set :( but its not quite as bad as I feared, there’s plenty of open ground up there, partly because it was so well dug over last year.

The final slope at the very end of the garden, however, is terrible. There are two big lavenders and a rosemary bush somewhere in there, and I literally can’t see them. I guess I just have to keep going, but, oh my word. Every time I go out there, I could just kick myself for the chance I let slip last year to have it all under control.