What Jobs Are We Doing In The Garden Today 2019

Still picking a few tomatoes every day now
But....pesky blackbirds!!! I thought I could pick ripe blueberries every morning and beat the birds without netting. Worked for a while but the crafty things have worked it out. Gotta laugh I guess better sling a net over them ..the blueberries not the birds...tomorrow

 

Seems a lot taller than my other variant. Never knew there were so many varieties including the yellow form Harlow Carr had everything except Lucifer..must be popular.

 

Just in.......dedicated or sheer cussedness??

Cut back hard a lavendar hedge.....around 40’ I guess. But it was damp, mizzle turning to drizzle and I should have stopped if I had any sense. Hedge trimmer and shears and an hour or two later the hedge is trimmed to a neat tight low edge around veg patch. I was reduced to a sodden state
Plenty of flowers still on it though.....a friend wanted the flowers for her lavender bag making hobby anyway......but I find lavendar has the rest of the summer now to prepare for next year’s flowers. It has flowered now for several weeks so I’m satisfied and a job done and dusted.

 

@Verdun I envy you your lavender hedge. I don't seem to have much luck with lavender, which is a shame as I love it. Tried different varieties. The lavender in my herb bath was doing very well up until a few weeks ago, lovely silvery green leaves and beautiful purple blue flowers, bees on it. It's died . No idea why.

I finished all my acrylic poured goods today and also a rabbit canvas, all ready to take to gift shop tomorrow. So, had an hour pottering around in garden. I have cut back all the scabious except one, in my raised bed. I was expecting to find some green growth further down but they were all brown , so have chopped them right back. I guess they have a 50/50 chance now. Weather forecast said rain so I didn't water them and rain has not happened . A few spots is all that came down. Dead headed a few flowers.

 

Yesterday I watered everything. I got up this morning to find it had rained in the night. Its amazing how often that happens.

G.

 

Raining hard here, so much for the bbc weather app
I’m not going to complain as we needed it.

 

Hiya Lucius
The soil here is light free draining sandy loam, the garden is warm (sheltered wall garden) and I never water lavendar. Given those conditions lavendar thrives.

Potted on colocasia esculenta ......from nothing two weeks ago it has grown 40 cm. will be huge. It will clearly have to go in the ground in 3 weeks or so. Not sure if I actually like it though.....first time growing it so...

It is now delightfully hot again.....if we get the rain tonight and tomorrow and it stays very warm there will be lots of new growth everywhere.

 

I’m having a fairly easy day. Only 3 jobs, done a small lawn cut and one small feed. The next one is at 2pm so it’s cuppa time.
It’s really humid out after the rain, I hate it but the rain was a welcome sight.

 

Picked Raspberries and Strawberries ,dead heading and watering and sat in the sunshine thinking about emptying my leaf mold bins and bagging it up but gave that thought a miss for today..it's too warm.

 

@Jack Sparrow that seems to happen to me as well with the watering

 

Potted some container plants into bigger pots and did a greenfly control round with houseplants. The Chinese are wrong, this is the Year of Greenfly Thankfully a quick wash with Fairy and a good rinse keeps them at bay.

Very optimistically I invented a new term, trans-habitatory It means that I decided that my variegated Vinca Minor will make a great houseplant and the accidental leftover baby of the spider plant which has been lying on the bench for a week (growing roots!) will brave the flowerbed. The Vinca is actually very attractive when seen close up so hopefully it will do well indoors. At least propagation is easy, apparently it's one of those where the preferred propagation method is to "take a cutting and turn your back for 30 seconds"

My Kiwi which has nearly died several times has one more chance. I checked the pot and whilst most of the roots have died, there is some healthy looking root growth so I dumped the rotted bits and gave the remaining bits fresh compost and a place on a windowsill. We'll see.

I have a difficult corner by the fence, it's in shade and the soil is not great, tending to either flood or dry to a point of cracking. Currently I have some hardy Geraniums there, but even they lean away from the fence leaving a gap. I took some cuttings of Sarococca, perhaps it will be ok there if I dig away a lot of the problem soil. I can't really think of any other plant to go there... any suggestions are very welcome!

Oh, and greetings from Crete... wild Echinops

 

Yes I planted 3 small lupins thought that there would be enough room but one got completely covered by a Japanese anemone, when I was weeding I pulled it up by mistake and put it in a pot.

Just an update on my wallflowers, I've got 305 the others haven't come up so that's it now for this year.

I potted on 23 polyanthus seedlings, couldn't do anything else because it's been raining all day.
So i did my bit of housework for the day.

 

Thursday evening was a nightmare.

I'd been doing a bit of dead heading of the roses in the garden and was about to come indoors around 8.00pm. when I decided to change the water in our Marinelli fountain. Easily done, I just put a bucket under it and pulled out the drain plug. Then filled it up.
I then decided to check that it was working. We don't have it on that often. I can overide the switch for it in the lounge by plugging the supply into a spare socket in the garage.

I turned it on, everything in the garage tripped out. Tried it again, same thing happened. I removed the fountain's mains plug and re-set the RCCB and everything else came on again.

Fortunately, I've a fairly sophisticated RCCB that protects everything in the garage, shed, formerly all the old pool systems, tea-house, all the garden lighting, the jukeboxes, plus two freezers. Not one of those that just plugs into a mains socket.



The fountain sits on top what was the former koi pool pump sump on a round concrete stepping stone.

I had my suspicions, so I decided to try to sort it out as heavy rain was expected on Friday.

So I dragged all 71kilos of the fountain off the stepping stone on which it sits and took a lump hammer and a bolster chisel to the mortar plinth below it to free up the stepping stone.

As I suspected, the sump was full of water, to the level it would have been when the pool was working.

This is what it looked like, when we had the pool. This holds 40 gallons. You can see the mains supply that connects to the pumps via waterproof connectors, though they were never immersed, just got a bit damp.

There was as much water as this in it, with the 13amp socket and transformer completely under it!



When I installed the fountain, I blocked off the outlets to the filter, the waterfall and the overflow drain. The sump is connected to the former pool's bottom drain, by a 4" pipe. I drilled several one inch holes through the sand and cement base of the pool and one through the bottom drain, so when the pool was filled in and paved, the water would be able to drain away. It's worked well for a few months, there's never been any surface water on the new paved area.

I'd retained the mains supply to the pumps which were in the sump, disconnected one in the garage and connected the other one to a 13 amp socket, which I screwed to the top of the sump under the rim, into which I plugged the fountain transformer which I situated next to it. The low voltage supply coming up through a hole in the stepping stone.

So I got my wet n' dry vac out and pumped out the water. I then saw that the water was still coming in through one of the holes I drilled in the side of the sump where I'd attached the socket. I must have drilled through the plastic wall of the sump and the encasing concrete into the bare earth. So I blocked it up and the other screw holes with mastic.

The fountain is designed for the low voltage cable to enter under the fountain through a groove in its base and I'd drilled a 1" hole through the stepping stone to accommodate it.

I decided I wasn't going to risk putting mains electricity into the sump again, although it had worked perfectly well supplying the two pumps it contained for thirty-odd years.

I screwed the transformer onto the garage wall, it sits neatly above another transformer that supplies the low voltage for one of the two Blagdon spotlights. It's now connected to the old wiring to the sump.

That's a "freebee" radio cassette player, I was given by a supplier. I've had it for about 25 years, it's designed to look like a 1947 Wurlitzer 1015 jukebox. "Not a lot of people know that."



I drilled a 1" hole in the centre of the stepping stone and pulled the cable through and connect up the pump and its LED lights.
The connector now sits in the tiny recess under the fountain base. I then replaced the stepping stone and dragged the fountain back onto it, filled it up, turned it on and it's working again. It took me until 9.30pm.

Although, not a pretty sight.



This new low voltage supply from the garage was how I was going to do it when I bought the fountain, but when I had a conversation with the supplier, before I bought it unseen, when I had no idea what sort of transformer etc., came with it, I was told any alterations would invalidate the guarantee.
But now I don't care. It's working fine.

Fortunately the transformer is completely sealed so no water got into it.
It doesn't really matter if the sump fills again.

What I think happened is that the ground water has been rising, it's probably come up partly through the 4" pipe and through the side of the sump through the screw hole. The 20 tons of compacted hardcore in the pool probably offered more resistance so the paving stayed dry.

I checked out the sump this morning by putting a cane down the redundant hole in the plinth and it came out dry.


I've made a start on the new plinth. I had to wedge up the stepping stone with a couple of bits of York stone to get it perfectly level again, before I forced the mortar between the rim of the sump and the stepping stone.




I've still to finish "tarting it up" but that will have to wait until the cement has dried off tomorrow. I've still got to mix up some more mortar coloured with some mahogany and black paint and brush it on to match the fountain.

 

Job done!

It's hard to match colours exactly with just a mixture of two colours of paint with sand and cement. It's a bit darker than the original at the moment, but will dry lighter, so I'm quite happy.

I checked the sump again with a bamboo cane down the redundant hole and it still came up dry.
Gave the ground cover plants a bit of a brush and a water so they'll soon recover.

 

I bet you have some nice carp in that pond, reminds me to get my angling gear setup.