Karmacat's Back garden

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

I found my garden fork – in the top third of the garden, on the path but hidden by weeds that had grown over it. Awful. I managed to find it because I just started to cut back the overgrowth around the access steps to this last part of the garden.

However, now I have it back, I’ve worked for about an hour tonight – cutting this grassy area thats at the start of the back garden proper (but cutting it with a pair of shears, horror of horrors), and raking it up. Some of it had to be cut to fit into the waste bags.

I also took some time to cut back overhanging shrubs on the grassy part, the lower part.

Looking over it now, it looks shorn but a lot, lot better. I really want to keep working at this kind of level so that I can have a proper garden again – when I look at the top third, that I haven’t managed to touch yet, I’m so sad, even tho its brilliant for wildlife, its literally completely unuseable for me.