A Family Garden

This weekend we did some pruning of the Yew that overhangs the vegetable plot and the Lilac at the end of the garden. The Yew was taking light and sucking the moisture from the bottom end of the vegetable patch. The Yew will be kept in

The Lilac was heavily pruned some time ago but we had left a couple of the large vertical branches. We were on a roll from doing the Yew so we decided to finish the job.

I now have a large pile branches that I need to trim and saw into logs, so it looks like I will have another way of keeping myself warm on these cold winter days.

As you can see from the picture below we have a far from perfect lawn. Its been a few weeks since it was last mowed and this is what grows up through the grass.

As of today all the flowers are gone, but they will be back.

It took two days to mow the lawn this weekend. Heavy showers interrupted saturday,

We have had the Iris plants pictured below in this Sainsbury’s bucket for a few years now. It was only meant to be a temporary place until we found a new home in the ground for them.

They have started flowering, do we just leave them where they are now?

They die back over winter and I top up the water over summer so they don’t dry out, but that is about it.

We got home late last night and spotted this beetle outside the patio doors. I managed to get this picture of it just as it was taking off…

It’s always nice to see the first flower of the year on our pink Cistus.

Finally the Hawthorn cuttings are starting to show some signs of life. You can see from the picture below that we have some new leaves emerging.

I mowed the lawn for the first time in a couple of weeks because of all the rain we have had recently.

Today M. took on the job of reshaping the lower left hand border next to the patio. The border edge has always been straight, but since the new patio was constructed it never looked good. The solution has been to put a curve in the border that starts out tangent to one of the patio sleepers and curves around on a constant radius to near the maple where it joins back in with the existing edge. Luckily the grass we cut out filled the area that was added to the lawn. I’ll need to keep this area well watered until the grass establishes itself.

The end result looks great and the lawn now sweeps up the garden.

My parents were visiting this weekend, and as ever my Dad is a real star when it comes to helping in the garden.  He cleared and dug over the overgrown border next to the blue bike shed, this was followed up by clearing the rest of the border all the way to the top of the garden. In the process we filled two cubic meter bags with brambles, ivy and other rubbish.

We planted the Palm the M. bought the other day. This involved removing the bricks that made up the manhole cover. The bricks were put into the pit along with a few other bits of concrete we had lying around. We then filled up with the composted grass and planted the palm.

We did lots of other tidying up, removing dead or sick plants, moving plants to new locations and planting newly bought plants.

With a freshly mowed lawn and all the kids toys tidied away the garden is looking good.

The first time for a few weeks. The lack of rain means the grass hasn’t been growing much. I bought two bags of horse manure to put into the compost heap before the grass cuttings went on.