Pre paint pottering

I’m circling around the paint pot. A spot of gardening before I settle down to a good afternoon’s brown goo work.

Actually brown was the theme du jour: leaf mould was needed. I ambled down to the last of the supplies behind the stables and brought up two wheelbarrows worth.

There were a few grubs and other exciting bits of debris in the compost, so I riddled like mad and managed to get a fantastic amount onto the beds.

I think its allure is the colour. It looks so healthy. Well, actually it looks like chocolate sprinkles, so it can only do good to the life of the soil underneath.   I have given this lovely compost to the small bed that now holds lots of day lilies and heleniums next to the huge Pannicum squaw grass.   And then had enough left over to cover the small edge of the vegetable garden where I like to grow flowers. It’s a bit of a grim place for plants to thrive. Very well draining (ie not much soil over a lot of rock) so hopefully this will help this year.   Or when in doubt just grow cosmos. That plant seems to put up with anything.

And then just to put it off a teensy bit more, I transplanted some random sedum autumn joy plants from rocks above the potting shed and added them to the rest of the sedums in the lilac bed near the front of the house.

In for tea, a change of clothes and back to the potting shed I plunged.

And here is the result. I’ve done one side completely, and made a start on the entrance as well.   The tin promised brown, but I dread to admit that I was coming up with another name: surgical bandage pink.   It looks like a giant truss.

But hey, I’m not going to waste any more time on this: let’s just wait for all the plants to grow up and cover the whole thing.

For an encore I painted the rest of my plant labels a more pleasing green. At least I have a fetching colour somewhere in this garden.