25-26 January: bin four

at home

Thursday, 26 January 2023

The weather had dried enough so that the deep path was dry enough to dig in.

I shovelled through the muck and got down to sand again and, to my surprise, a layer of brown clay.

I bucketed several buckets of the sand and clay to the expanded danger tree bed, where I am going to try to grow a mimosa. The bed was built up with rough compost and needs an area of real substance in which to plant the tree.

The cats thought it was too cold to sit out on the catios.

Thursday, 26 January 2023

I decided to try for more rough compost out of bin four.

Allan trampled bin three’s new clippings down for me.

I got four wheelbarrow loads of rough compost and used it to fill in where I had slightly widened a bed at the edge of the Bogsy Wood…

the deep path bed

..and behind a new bench…

…and a few other places. Every time I took the wheelbarrow forward again, I peeled off a batch of the ever annoying sweet woodruff, which I had intended to never have anywhere in this garden, from the centre bed.

For context, the unwelcome woodruff is just north of my contorted filbert.

If I hadn’t added weeding sessions, I might have got to the bottom of bin four. What’s left looks promising. I hope to get all the uncomposted debris into bin three before we go back to work.

An exciting shipment of plants came from Secret Garden Growers and from Forest Farm. I will have to wait to plant them because we are due for a couple of nights of below freezing weather. They will stay on the sunporch for a few days.

My mimosa and more are in the Forest Farm box.

Meanwhile, Allan worked on a project at the east fence where the bindweed next door is particularly rampant and invasive into our garden, The original fence was wire panels. That is not working because the bindweed uses it to climb and make a horrid backdrop. We had put up some plywood to hide it, but I had realized that if the wire came down, maybe the bindweed would crawl around next door instead of climbing our fence; then I can focus on trying to stop the roots from creeping under the fence into my beds,

Allan cut the bottom of the wire out beneath a piece of plywood where we had lacked a lower piece. We had been using a piece of tarp as a temporary and unsuccessful barrier for the lower part; he had now found a spare piece of plywood that would fit. He crawled under and clipped the wire from the other side.

After, with the wire sections removed.

The removed wire shows how uncontrollable the bindweed was on a wire fence.

He added in the new plywood piece, and we have finally achieved a solid barrier except for at the back of the neighbouring compost-and-bindweed bins, so we are scouting for a spare half piece of plywood to finish the barrier.

The cats all love the wrapping paper from mail order boxes.