Autumn planting

What a great day. The only thing that defeated me was the lack of light. I could have gardened for hours more, but 6pm was my cut off point.

I did manage to cram lots in. My main objective was to get in the plants that Leslie and Teo gave me.   And to reduce the stick pile in both the courtyard and the parking area and turn them into mulch.

Luckily the plants and mulch form a special relationship.   I cleared the weeds away from the top three terraces on the bank above the potting shed. And left the hardy clary sage and emerging cornflower seedlings.   But there was plenty of room to plant the hemerocallis (day lilies) and new teasel plants which I grew from seed.

A thick mulch around each plant, all over the rest of the area and it looked almost decent.  Â  And I had my usual company in that part of the garden; Ulysse.   When he is not escaping, he tends to hang over the fence, whinnying loudly and demanding apples.

And Artur was a barrel of luaghs. This cold weather makes him frisky. And he can’t settle in the potting shed as there are enemies about. Yesterday he had Nicolas’s dog Lolita lurking  and he hears hunting dogs in the distance.

So he decided to hunt me.   His trick of climbing up onto the pergola and dropping on me didn’t work. In summer it’s easy as the vine leaves protect him.   But in the blazing autumn sunshine and lack of vegetation meant I saw the attack coming. Bless.

When I wasn’t fending off the animals, it was transplanting the white roses from the terrace bank down to the bank in the corner of the potager.

And I planted the monarda in the only sunny but damp area of the garden.   This is the far end of the calabert garden.   When you leave the house and walk through the open barn and head up to the potting shed you pass through these new beds planted last year.   There must be an underground spring here because the euphorbias and rosemaries and cistus plants in here have romped away.   So in between the shrubs I have placed this gorgeous flower.   Here’s hoping it will thrive.

And in case you think it was all plants and chipping, I did collect a huge wheelbarrow load of stones as well.   In the gloaming, I was ferrying buckets of thelittle beasts down from the cache above the top vegetable bed and putting them into the back of the car.

Tomorrow is to be another wall day and I will have to keep up with Nicolas. Heavy gauntlets at the ready.

And I have a list of things that need moving into the potting shed. The lemon verbena plants in the pots are too heavy for me to do on my own.