I am feeling a bit embarrassed about the state of my garden at the moment. In my defence it has been either too wet or/and I have been too tired to get out there and do some badly needed house garden work. The back garden has no sun during the winter months and with the amount of rain we have had, for what feels like months on end, it is not getting the chance to dry out. Also despite adding plenty of ‘goodness’ over the years I have worked on it, the heavy clay soil makes draining an almost impossible job. I squelched out there this afternoon after my hospital treatment because it was sunny and I thought I should make an inspection – probably not a good idea, but it’s given me something to blog about.
I have posted a similar photo of the north facing border recently, and apologize for doing it again. The rain has flattened the soil and where it has flooded, due to the water not draining, the lawn edging has broken down. I have spiked the soil with a fork on several occasions to no avail.
The above photo shows more clearly what the flowerbed has turned into, the fresh greenery at the base of the wall is crocosmia (montbretia) which continues to spread and grow despite where it is planted! You can just see the achemilla mollis coming through again.
It is not just this bed that has had its boundary between soil and lawn flattened, the bed at the bottom of the garden has the same problem and it’s becoming difficult to see where the border ends and the lawn begins.
You can see that I have tried to dig over some of the panned soil and edge the lawn. The trouble with this is there are a lot of spring bulbs and the last thing I want to do is damage them. It’s all a bit of a mess as I said earlier, the grass is growing but it’s far too wet to mow and clumps of grass are beginning to spread into the flowerbed, so there is a lot of work to do.
The sticks are my effort to prevent the local cats from pooing and digging up the bulbs, it works to a point, they now poo on the lawn instead! It’s good to see the agapanthus growing along with the aqualigia, all signs of Spring not being too far away. What worries me most is that we haven’t yet had a really hard frost or a very cold winter spell. The damp and lack of frost is aiding and abetting slug and snail eggs hidden beneath the soil, so I could be suffering a bumper crop of these beasties with their voracious appetites. We need a really good frost so I can turn over the soil and kill off as many eggs as possible.
There is so much to do and I really should be thinking about pulling up dead stems etc, I usually leave them as protection for new growth. However, it just looks untidy now and it’s frustrating me. I am hoping that we have a good weekend soon and I can get out there and make a difference. At the moment with going to and fro the hospital every day I don’t have time in the morning and am tired when I get home.
It all comes good in the end though, as experience has taught me, so patience is the essence here, which is what gardening is all about.
