Back to beanies

Sun burn and sunhats yesterday, beanie and two fleeces today.  What a shame the weather changed.  And it drizzled and stormed all day. But was I deterred? Not at all. I had the walnut bed to plant up.

Oddly enough it took almost all day.  There are, I think, 37 plants here. Some of them beefy shrubs.   And unlike all the rest of the farm’s soil, this bed is laced with heavy clay. Which will be good for the plants in the future as the soil retains more nutrients than my normal free draining soil.  But today it was slow work.

So it was a case of digging out with fork and trowel, pouring in a bucket of water and waiting for it to drain away.  Then soaking the plant in another bucket of water while waiting for the draining. And traipsing back and forth from the water barrels and the compost bin with buckets of stuff.

I had to improve all the planting holes with my home made compost and then do the nifty sculpting of a bowl around each plant so I can soak them full of water until they are well established.  At least the clay was good for that particular feature of slope planting.

Ah yes, slope planting. Always fun. No wonder my back was aching by lunchtime.

It’s a shame I hadn’t mown or strimmed around the bed – it does look a bit scruffy right now.  But give it time and I should have a very picturesque bed to boast about.

And then of course I had forgotten about the lilies and the galtonia candicans. Fifty bulbs of each.

So just when I was keen to come in for a large cup of tea and a sit down, it was back out with a bulb planter and the basket of bulbs.

Luckily I have six large pots full of compost and nothing else down in the potager, so it was easy peasy to plant the big beasts.

The galtonia were a bit trickier as I had to grub about the beds putting a few here and a few there.  They are tall bulbs so I can’t just plonk them in the usual spots.  And I’m not madly happy with where they have gone – some behind the miscanthus in the pool garden, some among the pannicum grass bed and some near the monardias in the barn garden.

We shall see if I did a good job or not.  They are large bulbs so really need a lot of depth of soil.  Not something I’m blessed with (after a bit of digging you usually hit a stone or rock).

So that’s my day.  I did manage to pot on some cabbage and summer sprouting broccoli which feels like progress and about twenty of my purple sage cuttings have struck well.  So they needed potting up.  I took another twenty cuttings just before the rain came down harder than I could tolerate.  And then scuttled indoors via the woodshed to stock up on logs for the fire.  Wierd weather.