Month: September 2012

I was lucky to buy one of the plants on my Wish list at Bloom this year, I had seen it many magazines but not in a garden.  The only downside of it is that it grows quite tall 4 – 7 foot so needs good staking which stupidly I did not do and it blew over!  I lost half the plant as it broke off.  The other half is flowering, will definately stake it really well next year as it gives lovely colour at this time of year and is very different to the popular Goldsturm.

Is anyone going to the last open day of the Bay Garden this season?

It’s on Sunday 30th September, the grasses will be at their peak and there is the customary plant sale.

It’s been a busy last couple of months for different reasons hence I haven’t been posting diaries and I had to content myself with reading other members diaries. I cut out all the dead hedge from the last few winters which was quite a job, but it was well worth it. I badly need to get a load of weeding done for the winter, but will get to that over the next few weeks. Nearly all the shrubs are in great fettle except my Daphne pontica which has dropped its leaves and is a cause for concern as Daphnes are fickle at the best of times. I have finalised my autumn Rhodo order and will give details of it in one of my upcoming Rhodo diaries. Featured in the photos is a lovely shrub called Heptacodium, which I bought a few years ago on a whim as I knew nothing about it and I am glad I did. The flowers have a delicious scent and it has peeling bark as well which is a very appealing feature. It is deciduous and well worth its place in anyones garden.

Kaffir lily ‘Fairy Princess’ showed itself yesterday. There is another small clump coming up just beside it. Wahoo! It just gets better and better. And I love its gentle colour.

It is a great feeling to get to a stage when you are fine tuning in the garden.

I had a feeling an arch would look good entering Angel’s corner. So I got stuck into making  the arch yesterday. Making it went like a dream and I even got it fitted in place.

Really pleased with the result and feel it divides the are off perfectly.

A couple of tons of soil will be coming in a few weeks. This is to level out the are where the lawn will be laid next year. I want to get the soil in now to allow it settle over the winter.

I received my new Sarracenia today – about 25 plants and about 10 for a friend.

I now have a lot of Sarracenia.

A large Bog Garden is on the cards for next year.

What a rotten day here in Dublin. It was coming down in torrents at 4.00am when I got up and it let up for a mere 3 minutes during late afternoon. All good for settling the soil on top of the cave.

Early this morning I decided to get my bookshelves ready for some winter reading, tidied the whole lot up, and discovered a book lent to me early in the year by Rachel. Ooops!  Sorry, didn’t realize that I still had it. However, it’s safe, and I hope to get more of it read tomorrow.

And as I couldn’t get out much in the garden today, I decided to bring the plants inside by resuming my oil painting. Normally I would paint landscapes, seascapes or birds, feeling that flowers and plants in oil were a bit intimidating. However, in the last couple of weeks I have decided to bite the bullet and concentrate on flowers/plants alone for a while.

In the three minutes rain-free time today, I observed how well all my geraniums have done this year despite the rotten weather. It just goes to show that they really don’t need so much pampering in blistering hot sunshine.

One of my many failings is that I find it much easier to start a new project than to complete the ones I’m half way through.  And so over the weekend I left all the jobs that were pending to remove 4 badly grown larches which have been annoying me for years.  I love trees and wouldn’t consider removing one only these had leant with the wind while growing and were never going to make good specimens.

I am delighted to be rid of them.  The lovely straight pines behind now are shown to their best and the curve of the path, which had been too acute, I can now scale back so the path down can be more generous (in order for two well dressed ladies to saunter abreast don’t you know).

Of course you change something and all of a sudden other things need changing.  A row of Laylandii which I had been going to leave for another year or two to give shelter is now annoying me and may find itself removed.  The fruit trees that I moved to the bottom left corner last year may all have to move also.  The bottom left corner will go back to being Eden.  Then while repeatedly bringing branches up to the garage to be shredded I found I was using a route i normally wouldn’t and now must have a new seating area on that route.  Ho hum lots of work ahead for the winter.

I did collect a few new stones over the weekend so today did actually add to a little wall I was making.  A tiring job as simultaneously i was digging top soil out of a drain to put into that new bed.  The light waning drove me in.  I thought it must have been about 8pm and was surprised to see it was only 6.40.  Winter is coming!  And you’d be surprised how little firewood 4 larches yield. 

Our good friend Noelle left Ireland with her family for her new life in Oz last Thursday and will have landed there by now.  Best of luck to you Noelle.  We’ll miss you and hope you tune in to garden.ie every now and then and tell us how things grow down under.

This little solanum crispum ‘Glasnevin’ was bought yonks ago at the beginning of the summer in Aldi (9cm pot for, I think, €2.49). Didn’t think it would do anything, but ‘lo and behold it flowered in all that rain today! Bless his cotton socks!!! I think it’s a bit too tiny, and probably too late in the season to plant it out, so I reckon a bigger pot and a winter in the greenhouse might do the trick.

It has been so long since I have been here I nearly forgot my password!

My mum has been in hospital for the last 6 weeks but thankfully came home on Friday and making a good recovery, times have been so hard as she was in ICU for 4 weeks and critical for a few days but things are looking up again.  She has a long way to go as she has to have a operation (cancer) in 5 weeks but she has been an inspiration to us all remaining positive since her diagnosis in June.

Apart from not having time for the garden I actually lost all interest in it until yesterday.  I thought on Saturday I could get out there but I could not get my foot out the door!  Anyway hopefully I am back, will not be writing a whole lot as I am now working full time but I do love to read your journals.

Even though I have done next to nothing in the garden in the last 2 months I am still amazed at the colour there, just don’t look down low at the weeds -I don’t know how I am ever going to tackle them!

The bed that has amazed me most is my new bed, the progress has been good.

The Dahlia Bishop of Llanduff has been flowering for weeks, I will definately lift them and store them for the winter and the Dwarf Sunflowers from seed from Lidl have been great.  Everything else has rocketed all of a sudden.

Looking forward to our next Get Together 🙂

Even though its a rather grey and damp morning here in Donegal, I dont think anyone is allowing that to dampen the spirits! And although we have sympathy for Mayo, its a true saying “Winner takes all”! Im not a sports person but the excitment rubs off!

I was looking at these pictures that I took of my apple trees at the weekend and thought how the joy of harvest only comes at the end of a long season of hard work and preparation! This tree has been here for well over forty years and had lived and fruited in another orchard before that!! Most of the apple trees here were being removed from a neighbour’s orchard to make way for a tennis court and were rescued by my father and planted here!  I think I have inherited his reluctance to see any plant wasted!

Anyone know what this little shrub is? Very similar to a cotoneaster, but I don’t think it is.  It and the skimmia were part of a pot given to us as a housewarming present. I grew them on in separate pots for a year and have just planted them out.

I do remember taming my ‘wild’ part of the garden a few years ago just after joining this site. Basically it was only a case of digging out weeds and levelling. But I always got lazy after it had been done, and each year after that I had to tame the wilderness yet again.

Last year when Steve started this project, the wilderness became more like a dumping ground, for the soil that he dug out. And thus burying the trunks of shrubs up further than I was happy about. It’s lashing out there right now but I’m hoping I can manage to spread out the soil later for the last time, to release the Photinia and Euonymous. Yesterday I noticed some roots on the Photinia, or maybe they’re suckers growing where I removed some of the soil that it has been sitting in since last year. 

Not being privileged to attend posh Fern courses I have to struggle on and devise my own idea of a Fernery. This is a part of the make-over of the front gardens which is still very much a work in progress.

The gravel was laid during the week and is looking well, and there was more than enough in the 10 tons! We even had enough left over to put a layer on the woodland paths! Brendan has taken to strolling in around these little paths which were totally uninviting to him before!

I acquired some lovely logs for the new Fernery – it is the area under the birch trees that I mentioned in a previous journal. The soil in this area is pretty appalling so I’ve made use of the logs to raise the level of the bed with some topsoil. 

I used thick layers of newspaper under the topsoil to suppress the grass, clover etc. I used this method before with success in the past, so hopefully it will work this time. I didn’t want to spray of the grass, and I didn’t fancy digging it either! 

The single fern photo is one that I think Jemo brought me? Any chance of a name for it please? I have names for most o the ones I’ve put in here and I’m afraid all the good advice about which ferns would like this location went out the window – I just went around lifting ferns that were not showing their best and hoping for the best 😀

I also had a few in the “Nursery Bed” that were starting to root through the bottom of their pots.  A couple of pots full of daffodils, bluebells and unidentified spring-type bulbs were scattered about in true woodland manner, and finally some helebore seedlings also found new homes there.

this is one of the last flowering shrubs in the garden. its full of sun-like discs of deep yellow flowers….staving of the winter

this poor little divil was well-hidden under a mass of dying peony leaves

was out weeding when i happened across some little spring leaves showing above soil level. dont ever remember this happening so early

Sowed very few seeds here this year. And the few I sowed weren’t in as much bulk as last year. I spotted these today, thinking they were Tanacetum. Wrong again!!!!! No label. Doesn’t matter though, as most stuff is starting to go over. It came as a welcome surprise.

As Martin said earlier, we had a great day along with Kindredspirit at the Botanic gardens yeaterday.

The best part for me was to get into the Killarney Fern House which was featured on the TV in the last few months.

While some of the items went over my head, we came away with reading material that will help me in time.

It was great to look at parts of these plants under the microscopes, really interesting.

Once you scrape away at the surface, there is little to these wonderful plants. Basically what is involved is the following……….

Spores — Prothallium (early) — Prothallium (mature) — Sporophyte (young) — Fern

See nothing to it  ;-))

LOL

Can’t remember which cosmos seeds I sowed this year. Most of them ended up white, which I love next to blue. But I must admit to loving this pink one, in the same mix, with its lovely ‘fluted’ petals.

We managed to shift another ton of soil over the cave between the two of us. But in all fairness, Steve did the bulk of it. Most of my time was spent on top of the cave compressing soil, as much as I could, and weeding what was being thrown up. I admit I get a bit bored if the work in the garden isn’t more physical. But I’m off tomorrow, and Steve isn’t!!!!

We came up against a stumbling block – more foundations of the shed that was previously in this area. Steve managed to hack away a lot of it with lump hammer. But it really needs something more powerful. Hopefully he can borrow the relevant equipment in his job.

The soil was beginning to fall down into the ‘pond’ area as soon as it was being piled on top. So I came up with the idea of wedging slates in a stepping stone fashion (previously used a couple of years ago for the ‘paved’ circle before the greenhouse pond). I knew they would come in useful at some stage. 

I apologize if these journals about the ‘cave’ seem boring.

Yesterday he went to Graiguenamanagh where there was a Bookfair. Now usually he manages to find one or two books that he absolutely has to have-sometimes they become birthday or Christmas presents if they are expensive. Well yesterday-not one book! Well there was one but it was 650 Euro! So that was a little on the dear side-and he didn’t actually long for it!(And even if he did he’s not that cracked!) BUT there was a plant stall there from growers in Clare and he got three Aruncus and two Heuchra and two Catmint (white) and a freebie of a good Sedum. Now the plants are healthy but the surface is covered with liverwort on some of them. Should I scrape all that off before planting. I don’t want a field of it!

But the comment relates to the urn. He was able to get out this morning for a little while-didn’t even change to gardening gear and dug out two ferns. This makes the path near the urn more visible and sets off the urn nicely. He thinks Elizabeth11 and Hazel are correct in counselling him not to plant something big into the urn as it takes from its lovely shape. Now he has put up two pictures. One with ivy and one without. Which in your opinion please is the most pleasing? He’s not sure.  He thinks he likes ———   but respectfully requests everyone’s opinion!!

Hi Folks, this morning i planted blocks of my winter onions. The variety is Element F1, its a bulb onion mild sweet and crunchy which you harvest in may/june and is fab. in salads. It bulks up well and stores well into winter.

 This morning saw the completion of Bay 1 of Elizabeth’s compost zone.

Eddie had cut down some of the growth with chansaw and Elizabeth had cleared a lot of the undergrowth.

The boss and I arrived down this morning; did some final levelling and then nailed home the reinforcement bars to hold the pallets in place.

A couple of hours later, six pallets standing in position to create three walls and two sheets of timber to create removeable front doors/gates.

We now have at least six months to create the next bay.

Now upto Elizabeth to fill the compost area…….