Deep excavations

Am I ever out of the dirt? It seems I spent the day in the stuff. I began the day with weeding in the shade garden.   This was easy as the soil is so soft and the weeds just gave up as soon as I approached.   Marvellous.

And then I was able to put down the last bag of mulch.   I’m short two bags to complete the entire shade garden area.   Well, I actually need six more bags to do the top side.   But that can wait. The festuca grasses are planted so closely together that there won’t be that many weeds to push through.

And I need to do a more careful weed and mulching of the area where all the euphorbia polychroma and aquilegia lurk. But they form such a thicket of ground cover that I can leave it until next week.

It looks quite fetching with its carpet of dark mulch. I am pleased.

And even more pleased to see some life in the cistus shrubs I thought had carked in over the cold winter. They look a bit battered, but there are new leaves appearing on the blasted stems, so I have to leave well alone and wait.

And then to get even grottier, I moved onto the calabert garden to weed there too.   Here it’s trickier as I had to cut back a lot of poorly shrubs as I hoovered up the weeds.

There are dead perovskias, sickly rosemaries, a very dead teucrum and rather absent agapanthus in here. I’ve pruned back and cut out as much as I dare.   And generally fussed and bothered about in the gravel and the mulch. I have more lavenders to plant in here when I get away from weeding and get stuck into more creative toil.

Now I could have swanned off and done something else after all this weeding. But no. I decided to go for the deepest excavation of weeds of all. Time to sort out the wildflower garden.

This is the very long fifteen metre terrace just above the swimming pool. The far right end is fine – it has well established achillea pot of gold, cornflowers, gauras and many wildies that came from a packet of Pictorial Meadow flower mix years ago.   It does need a bit of refreshing. But boy does the far end of the terrace need more work.

When I first cast my gaze over the area my first thought was – good, a quick weed. I mean it just looks like lush grass that needs to come out. But I was to be cruelly disappointed.   But it’s a good thing I always have the end result in mind. I know this will be a stunning blank canvas to scatter my wildflower seeds. But it’s going to be Sunday at least before I can do that.

Rule one. Never try and keep a neat garden underneath a stonking fifty foot high chestnut tree. Well armed with thick gloves I first had to pick up all the chestnut burrs that had embedded themselves in the grass and soil.

And then there were the playfully hidden brambles. And tendrils. And broom plants. And a carpet of nasty wild mint.   I stood up and decided to scrape the weeds off the wall above the garden and came across a dilemma.

Is this wall a rock? Or a badly constructed loose terrace; hand made and liable to topple? If I keep scraping off the weeds and soil will I end up with an avalanche? It’s an exciting bit of excavation.   I still don’t know what’s underneath as I got a bit scared and stopped.

I’ll have a better look tomorrow.   So instead I contented myself with removing metres and metres of weeds from the flat bit. But where to put this mountain of weeds? I had started a compost bed way beyond the duck pond at the very end of the property. It is building up nicely and as I plodded over with my first bag of weeds I discovered something wild and fluffy sleeping in among the green mess. Artur. Getting his sun kicks in a very strange place. Still, it was fun to wake him up every time I walked over and added a pile near his head.  

He came over to inspect my work at occasional intervals. But preferred to snooze in the sunshine.

I could have done the same, but I had the urge to keep going.   The tricky bit was to not weed out the lovely poppies and cornflowers that are well established already here, and not to step on all the rose cuttings that I have struck here. Or knock the heads off the emerging lilies.

But by the end of the day with a thunder storm brewing I decided to stop.   I have a few more hours to go just removing the weeds. And then I’ll have to think about the wall. But that’s the morrow. Now it’s Friday night and that means the first beer of the week. Hurrah.