What are we doing in the garden 2025

Sedum spectabile [Hylotelephium] has never needed Chelsea chopping here - until this year. Lucky if it's even 6 inches at the end of May normally.
How big is the hole @lizzie27 ? Foxes regularly dig holes in our front garden edging/borders, and they can be fairly small. They can certainly dig out something they get a whiff of. Badgers normally rip up huge areas. We don't get them in the immediate area, but there's colonies of them a little further away on an open patch of ground near ponds, woodland etc, and I've often seen them going into the nearby gardens.
I took advantage of the reasonably dry spell, and cooler weather, yesterday to get stuck into all the hedging/shrubbery along my boundary. Just a small stretch to do - battery ran out. It'll need to wait until about Monday at least, due to weather. Didn't do a lot apart from that. It was a bit blustery for any fiddly work. Tied in clem stems, and lifted and potted an Iris for a colleague of older daughter, who wanted a purple Iris as she only has yellow ones.
Good work on your pond area @Selleri. It's very simple to get it done in one go. First, you get hold of....
Joking apart, don't want to worry you but - you may still find you have to faff with it in the coming months...or years! All worth it though. I've fiddled and enlarged and readjusted mine umpteen times. I like a project...
This was taken about a week ago. The Iris Dreaming Yellow has opened in the last few days [just beyond the S's Seal on the far left] but it's just out of sight in that pic. I must take another one.

 

Yes, this is what I had in my mind of your garden to look fairygirl ... it was the pond. I like it all. Is this front or back?

 

Thank you @Victoria - very kind . This is the back garden. The house is to the right hand side, so it's a slightly different layout from the more 'usual' way, where you're look at the length of the garden from the house, rather than the width.
That view is from roughly where the new pergola is, and the other end is the border beside the 'main' road. The rear access road is to the left - we're on a corner.
Front garden is fairly ordinary, with grass and some basic borders.

 

We had a fruitful morning! Picked yet more red currants, some strawberries and the first bowl of morello cherries. Cleared a section in the veg patch and sowed some more peas directly (will never see them again). Then weeded an area at the edge of the pond. Lovely to see the demoiselles flitting about.

 

Is there s 'usual' way? My garden is all to the front of the house which faces East.

 

I know what you mean @Victoria! I was just referring to that regular, more typical style of housing with the longer, narrower shape of garden, especially with terraces. The front garden would be bigger but there's a small layby there to provide more parking, so it's a narrowing shape from the house to the front boundary.
Our last house was large and sprawling, and had pretty much everything at the front too. More west facing though. My house round the corner was a very irregular shape, front and back, and this one is also a bit 'off'. It's about arranging and adapting it to suit what you like though, isn't it?

 

Our house sits sideways onto the lane, facing full south and in the south east corner of our plot. The bulk of our 1.4 hectare plot lies to the west and north of the house but we do have a drive between us and the gate with a large island bed in some grass to the south east and my rose bed on the east side of the house.

A big chunk of it is pasture and the rest is ex pasture plus the original house, now in ruins, and a barn which lost its roof in a tornado in 2020. There used to be an enormous barn right in the middle and I suspect a lot of the quarrying I do whenever I try and make a new bed is the stones the farmers buried when it was demolished.

There is also a large pond, originally dug to provide water for the cows. It was completely overgrown when we arrived but we had it all scraped out by a chappy with a mini-digger. It is now filling again with bullrushes and some brambles. Other than a weeping willow and a corkscrew willow at either end we don't plant anything as the water is either way too deep or evaporates in summer and is way too shallow. Great wildlife habitat.

There was a field on the opposit corner of some crossroads, 200m away: smaller than our entire plot and yet they've built 8 houses on it!

 

Nothing today went to see my friends.

 

Lots of watering, as we are looking at a hot & dry week, and a bit of weeding.

I also noticed that my container pond is getting algae, so I have ordered a product for it for the short term (Blagdon "Green Away") and next weekend I plan to get more floating plants, to reduce the amount of light below the surface. I am also tempted to pop to my local garden centre and get some more oxygenating ones today.

Then in the evening I plan to spray (again) two roses which are suffering badly from blackspot. They are both Lady of Shalott, which is said to be a healthy variety, but I struggle with it. I don't see blackspot on any of my other roses. I have tried adjusting the watering, removing infected leaves, improving the air circulation, organic fungicide, non organic fungicide.. Nothing seems to work.

 

I’ve planted a Lady of Shalott today @CostasK. I grew one here over 10 years ago and it didn’t do too well because of my sandy soil and the border was rather cramped. I’ve improved the soil since and have put it in the sunniest location so am hoping it will cope and won’t become a Lady of Shall Not .

Have you tried planting Lavender or Nepeta nearby? The volatile oils are claimed to aid disease resistance. Also, avoid putting bark on the soil, it can harbour black spot spores, like leaf litter .

 

Finished off this border with gladioli, Snapdragons and corn chamomile.

And planted gladioli here

 

There are many positive sides with Columnar Stocks, such as being "free seeds with every issue" and germination rate of around 200%. And they are quite pretty.



The downside is that the seedlings survive absolutely every neglect imaginable, today we kept finding old fruit trays with something like hard, dry felt in it, and Stock seedlings happily growing on. The felty thing was their roots.

So about 30 Stocks went in here there and everywhere.

The important job today was to get the planting around the pond in. 10 Bergenias grown from very cheapy plugs over winter, Festuca Glauca from seed, various ferns and some Vinca Minor, and Angel's fishing rods (Dierama), one big white to spill over the pond edge and the (future) path, and a smaller pink one I bought as an afterthought.



The Child should have become an architect, or a builder. She has an unerring skill to put things in poker straight lines, no matter how hard she tries not to.

In addition to around-the-pond operation we now have straight lines of Cosmos (dwarf and real ones, well intentioned labelling efforts have all been abandoned by now), Drumstick Primulas and Mulleins and very few assorted pots remaining.

The Artichoke which will never fit in but I have to grow just for the sake of it , is in next to the Poundland Rhubarb, and the poker straight line is completed with a bucketful of assorted Poundland summer bulbs- the tall white Gladiolus like and the short, purple one loved by crossword puzzle makers and Scrabble players.

The 50cm terracotta pot went in the front of the house and now hosts a shrubby Fuchsia Display, a trailing one (Claudia?), dwarf Cosmos, ground Ivy for trailing and some Corncockle seedlings of my favourite "free seeds with every issue" type.

The pot has an important function, it prevents people from stumbling on the large iron ring apparently used by the previous owners to tether a horse, or perhaps a motorbike.

Harvested some lush lettuce and glory of all glories, a garlic! We planted some Tesco cloves in October in a spare box just because we couldn't do anything else in the junkyard also known as "new garden just after moving in", so I'm very pleased with our first ever home grown garlic

 

Lady of Shall Not really made me laugh @Plantminded

One of the two is indeed in a border (at the front of the house) with lavenders, 3 other plants and 3 other roses (Emily Bronte, Penelope Lively, The Country Parson). I have mulched with bark chippings, but it's not right against the plants, I have left a bit of clearance for each plant. It is a sunny border. There are 4 more roses at the front of the house, just not in that border (For Your Eyes Only, Scepter'd Isle and two Silas Marner). Milady is the only one with blackspot (or at least that is the case so far).

In the back garden, I have her daughter (that I grew from a cutting) and again it's the only rose in the back garden that suffers badly from blackspot. The others are: Lady of the Lake, The Pilgrim (my favourite rose), Bathsheba (my least favourite), Bring Me Sunshine, and an unknown gifted rose that hasn't flowered yet.

Please note that my experience does not align with what others are saying about Lady of Shalott. It's still such a striking rose and it's even pollinator friendly. It's also the first David Austin rose I fell in love with. As frustrated as I am with the blackspot, I don't think I can break up with her, especially if that involves murder

 

I pruned back a very large potted osteospermum as it had pretty much finished one flush of flowers. It is old and woody and I've decided not to lug it to and from the garage in cold weather next winter, but let nature take its course. My back is aching like mad and everything is a huge effort, so I need to scale back a bit on trying to keep everything alive at all costs. I never used to understand when people said their garden had got too much for them, but now I do.

Ah well.

 

Today I finished planting up a border that I've been working on for a while, adding two more roses, Lady of Shalott and Vanessa Bell. Of the two, Vanessa Bell grabs your attention in the fading evening light. Both have nice light fragrances. I removed all the grasses from this border last year apart from three Imperata rubra used as edging. The other roses are Warm Welcome on the obelisk, Gabriel Oak, Roald Dahl and For Your Eyes Only, with a couple of Verbena bonariensis and Heucheras, a Nepeta, an Allium, a tall columnar Rudbeckia and a Sanguisorba. Possibly overplanted, but I'll get pruning and digging when they start filling out .