Thursday, 11 April 2024
at home
The promised rainy reading weather stopped at mid morning, rather to my disappointment.
As often happens when I am taken by surprise by good weather, I turned to a compost project. I had decided to put some of the assorted clumps of different kinds of sanguisorbas, including one I had to move while shifting a path and some others that had reseeded too vigorously. It can be a pest of a plant and yet is one of my favourites. I had already put one big clump in the boat and needed to build up with mulch around it.
I made a mixture in the wheelbarrow of sifted coir, sifted compost from bin three, and sifted leaf mould. Bin three, before:
Leaf bin has some good “mouldy” parts:
We have been fortunate to be given blocks of coir from two different friends who were downsizing their gardening ambitions. One block had been soaking in a bucket and was easy to break apart.
First barrow ready to go to the garden boat:
A photo of the boat I took a few days ago:
The soil had gotten quite low and now, after adding two semi-barrowloads of mixed mulch, the front section is fuller and fluffier.
Skooter loves to have Allan let him out the front door so he can walk around to the compost and potting area and ask to be let in the back door.
In tidying up the potting area now that I have reorganised the kitchen compost and leaf mould bins, I found a big item we’d salvaged from a debris pile at the port: a weather station thingie that used to be wired to a boat.
Allan refreshed it with some black spray paint, next to his handsome white rhododendron.
He thought we would have to dig a hole, but I’d had the brainstorm of sticking the pole into one of the little corner pockets of one of the fish totes, with some bamboo sticks jammed in to hold it tight. It worked great, and was so easy!
That wonderful debris pile near the boatyard, where we got so much good wood and other stuff, is no more. I miss it!
I did a bit of edging on Center Loop East.
There is a lot more edging and shaping to do. I got just enough sod for a path project.
I used the sod on Willows Loop East, where I am shifting a path to the left so that the hedge of box leaf honeysuckle doesn’t have to be trimmed.
Before:
I didn’t think of this project early enough to move the blueberry. I will move it next autumn, and next year, the path can go right next to the red fish tote, which is kind of a useless little corner to have any sort of garden at ground level.
After:
I know from long experience of pathing paths together that this will soon knit into a very acceptable grass path. And the part next to the hedge that has gotten all mucked up with dirt during my big weeding job will have the grass grow through pretty soon.
Looking east from the path over the bed that is no longer choked with weeds, and which is much more full of good, tall plants than it looks right now:
Out of the area which became path, I’d had to dig some clumps of narcissi, which I moved “in the green” (which they like just fine) over to the west side of the garden.
Willows Loop West:
In the greenhouse, a banana is unfurling and Salvia africana-lutea and the Australian mint tree are blooming. I so look forward to May when I can bring them out into the garden.
Does the weather station thingy work or is it just decorative?
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About all it does is show what direction the wind is coming from. It probably quit working otherwise, thus ending up in the trash pile.
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The Sanguisorba that you gave me got planted as a solid clump because it was already starting to grow, and because it was so tough that I did not want to divide it. That is very not my style, since I prefer to divide such clumps. I can divide it next winter. It is also not my style to mix cultivars, but I mixed the cultivars of Persicaria bistorta. I can always keep their copies separated later, if I choose to. I thought that I got two cultivars, but while putting them into the garden, I found a third label for Persicaria bistorta in another box. Did I get copies of all three, ‘Superba’ ‘Firetail’ and ‘Dimity’?
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Wow, that rhody is so big and pretty! Skooter is so funny. I always love seeing him.
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He never fails to be amusing!
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