A little light transplanting

Ah, a project. I have been plotting this one for a while now.   When you walk up the path from the house towards the potting shed you are confronted with what I call the shade garden. Two huge chestnut trees overhang this area of garden. And therefore make it dry and shady and not much fun for plants.

Oh, and it slopes. So it’s not a lot of fun. No wonder I have just mulched it and pretended it didn’t really exist.   On the left hand side I have been planting like mad.   But not madly enough. I’m still not happy with the look.   But I need to quadruple the quantity of plants to make it look half decent. And all my little cuttings are a long way off turning into plants.

So what to do? Or in the Leninesque way ‘what is to be done?’.   Cheat. I have decided to turn the area into a lawn. But with a difference. I’m using the local grass here called Festuca Glauca and a fine plant it is too. People actually pay money for it.

And as it’s a weed, I can stalk about and uproot them and move them into a new home.

First I had to clear the area first. That’s about ten metres long by three metres wide. And full of stones.

But it was a beautiful sunny day, no wind and Artur took up position nearby to keep an eye on me; but mostly to snooze.

By early afternoon I had enough cleared and raked and preened to be able to start transplanting.   But I had a few other chores to do first. Forest work. Chucking logs, and pruning roses.

The roses are fun because you get the pruning leavings to try and turn into plants.   So wearing thick gauntlets I pruned back all the courtyard roses and collected the sticks in a bucket. Cut down to size and then plunged into the newly cleared area of the wildflower garden near the pool.

See accidently planting all those lily bulbs in that bit of ground wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

And then I remembered that first thing on my list for the day was actually strawberry work.

I had potted up the runners late summer and now was the perfect time to cut them free of their parent plant and plant them in the bed.   Some of the leaves are turning a fetching red.   And the soil is nicely soft to pop in the new baby strawberries.

I had forgotten my mighty rubber gloves, so the nettles that grow out of the wall behind the strawberries and lone fig and forest of verbena bonariensis live for another day.

And then in the late afternoon, we went down to the lower terraces and set up the trail camera (infra red night vision) to try and find some wildlife.   We have missed our chance of getting the badger which had nested down near the vineyard.   No action on its territorial dung heap and the path through the forest looks neglected.

Hopefully we will catch something plodding on the path over the next two months.