New growth

The weather here has really scuppered my new found enthusiasm to get my garden in order. No sooner had I decided on some lovely new features and actually started building them when the heavens opened and don't seem to have closed since. I'm certainly no fair weather gardener but I hate, hate, hate sloshing around like a pig in muck so most of my time outdoors has been spent either in the workshop or in the polytunnel - which has actually never looked so organised.
There's not much flowering in the garden at the moment - a design flaw (I use the word 'design' very loosely here) on my part, most things seem to flower in summer in my garden with little interest the rest of the year round - a flaw I aim to correct this year and next year.
The polytunnel is a different story though, there's greenery everywhere and plants are starting to flower that wouldn't be flowering for another 6 weeks or so outside.

These Hostas and Acers are romping away under the polytunnel staging.

This Weigela is in full flower whereas the one outside has barely leafed up yet. The Heuchera next to it is also in full flower.

My first standard Fuschia! It was a cutting from a Fuschia I found growing wild up the road and it's perfect for standards - grew very quick and forms lovely. It is starting to flower but I've pinched the ends out again since this photo was taken so that I can get a larger shape.
I also have a Hawkshead standard that I grew at the same time as this one but it doesn't look anywhere near as impressive and the growth is nowhere near as bushy.

In December 2013 I thought I'd give Rose cuttings a try. I took several cuttings from various roses I have and quite a few have taken and succeeded. This one is a climber called 'Snowqueen' (I think) and will be ready to plant out this year along with the others I did.
I forgot to take cuttings late last year so I did them in January this year on the off chance they would take - out of about 10 cuttings only 3 have taken but that's 3 new roses I don't have to buy.

Outside the Rhododendrons are flowering, at least the ones near the polytunnel are, the ones on the garden are still just in bud.

THE most loathesome plant I have ever had the misfortune to come across - Gorse. At first it was a novelty, it completely covered our 3 acres here but to start with we found the spears amusing and the flowers and scent made up for the fact it's such a bully. But that was before we knew how hard it is to eradicate.
The first 2 years we lived here we bulldozed the land of all this gorse and set fire to the heaps - huge mistake. The heaps were full of dry spindly gorse which doesn't really burn well but given that the soil was peat based THAT managed to burn and burn and burn. 2 years after lighting the fires if we got a good crosswind we could see smoke start billowing from those heaps - I kid you not!
That was our first realisation that this awful plant was not going to go down easy, followed by the renewed growth that was thigh high by the following year. We knew then that all those days and nights with the bulldozer, all those blisters and all those painful piercings from the spikes was a complete waste of time.

We contemplated weedkilling the lot but in the end, 2 years ago (10 years after moving here) we got another bulldozer in, scraped the lot out, pulled out every root we could find, every rock we could find, levelled the land and then reseeded it all. We figured that our mowers could keep the stuff down if it manages to start growing again.
This is the land that we've managed to sort out as it stands now. The bottom fence is to keep the dogs on this area but we also have the trees past the fenceline and a lovely burn running straight the way through. I love the deciduous trees down there, especially the Oak trees but we haven't even made a start on the Gorse that grows beyond the point of the fence.

The area of grass directly in front of the house is the land that MrTG ploughed by hand, rotovated by hand, de-stoned and raked and flattened all by hand and it has to be said it's the best bit of land we have. The land further down is what the diggers and ploughs did and it just isn't as level as we'd like PLUS that darned Gorse is still attempting to come through. There's a carpet of it around the corner of the polytunnel but luckily the mowers do keep it down. Think that weedkiller may be coming out after all!!

Garden overhaul

The Cauli's and Cabbages planted in the polytunnel are still getting eaten by slugs (I haven't got around to putting down cardboard yet) so I was quite surprised to find that the ones outside in the raised bed haven't been touched at all.
I do keep them covered with fleece to keep the butterflys off them but surely that wouldn't deter slugs?

Here's a glimpse of the extra land to the side of the house that we're thinking of adding to the existing garden. There's as much of it as I need but as you can see it needs a whole lot of work and extends way out to the right and far behind me.

That ground is about 3ft deep of hardcore so any planting would have to be in raised beds, grass would be viable if we lay a good layer of top soil first.
The back fence does have a line of Willow trees, these are usually shallow rooted and don't last very long in our winds so we dug out a trench all the way along the fence first approx 3 ft deep to the soil below. The 6ft willow were then planted into that and the trenches filled in with soil, this means that at least 3ft of the trees are underground and should therefore stay upright.
Still that's gonna be a lot of work if we go ahead.

Remember when I said in my last post that Mr TG and I were discussing what water feature to add in the pond? Well I was thinking along the lines of this

http://www.retaildisplaysandprops.com/custom_nature-themed_environments.htm

Ok more realistically this

http://www.waterfeatures.co.uk/nh.html

Basically I would have liked us to build something where the water runs off slate.
Today though I left Mr TG to his own devices and I thought he was working on "his" patch of land that he's been clearing but nope he'd been erecting this

Excuse the foreground mess it's waiting for decking to be erected but that piddly fountain is everything I hate about garden water features. Some people can make them look great but the wind we get here makes that kind of 3 tier fountain pretty pointless.
I'm currently convincing Mr TG that we need to collect some of the humongous rocks we have and make it look nicer than just an oblong with rocks round it - hard work though, bless him he thinks a water feature is a water feature is a water feature so it could take some time.

With the first half of the garden requiring only minimal work now - mainly decking - I can get onto to the second half once the dogs have their own area finished.
This is the current state of some of the bit to do

It's full of weed and it's been made worse by the fabric we put down under the gravel. The weeds had no problem growing through it and even self seeded in the gravel itself, this image only shows the grass weed but honestly, it's a mess.
All the Pink and Blue is Aquilegia, one plant that self seeded over and over again and is now more of a weed than a plant - but it's a pretty weed so it gets to survive one more year.
There are some nice plants in there such as a Rhodi, Hosta, a hardy Fuchsia, Dogwood, Cranesbill etc but I'm looking forward to getting to grips with this second half later in the year.

Blah, blah, blah.....

Do you ever have one of those Blah days in the garden? You have a list of jobs that need doing but you just feel Blah? You need to move plants but....Blah?  Paint something.......Blah? Build something...Blah?
Well that was me today, blah, blah blinkin blah!
Don't get me wrong I got stuff done but to be perfectly honest I couldn't have given two hoots about whether the job was done properly - I get those Blah days every so often and I guess they're the days when I should just sit and enjoy the garden (if it were warm enough of course, oh and if the plants were actually growing of course).
Last night Mr TG dug out a rather thuggish grass that was making itself known around all my other plants and had even taken to mingling with my garden grass - gasp, I hardly have any decent grass left after the dogs have mullered it so no way was I giving it up for this invasive, rude species of unknown name (though I suspect it is ribbon grass)
So today I had the wonderful task of digging out all the roots I possibly could so I could reset the area back to proper grass.

All cleared. It's a bigger area than it looks.

Then I had to relocate a Rhododendron from the same area to another area of the garden. This poor Rhodi has taken a battering from the variegated thug grass and an even bigger battering from me as I prized all the grass roots out from the roots of the Rhodi. I don't hold out much hope of said Rhodi surviving but whatever .... blah!

Rhododendron 'Cunninghams White'.

Yes, I really did re-plant it at the front of a freaking border - where was my mind!  I actually thought this was a smaller type of Rhodi but having looked at 'RHS plant selector' I see it's going to possibly grow to about 2 metres - great. Looks like I'm potting the thing in a bucket tomorrow - grrrrrrr!

On a less blah note, I pricked out my first batch of veggie seedlings and got them into small pots ready to grow on

In all honesty I was a bit premature with this batch of pricking out, they could have waited a little longer but what the heck, they'll be fine. The first few pots had Perlite put on top but I got in a mess doing it and gave up - blah!

I do have casualties though. My sweetcorn - Incredible F1 - aren't going to survive.

They're really not as pale and bleached as they look, it was the cameras fault but still they're not going to make it plus I only had about 50% success rate with what took anyway.
I've always had 100% success rate with sweetcorn so I don't know why getting a heated propagator this year made me do things differently and sow them too early with heat - won't be doing that again!
I've sown more Sweetcorn Incredible F1 today (which is the time of year I normally do it) and am growing them in the polytunnel without heat.

The best part is that my 2 new raised beds we built last Autumn are now ready for their veggies. The soil in this is pretty darned fluffy and I'm quite pleased with the quality of it. It's entirely top soil and as I haven't managed to get them manured on time I'll scatter some Blood, fish and bone a couple of weeks before we plant anything out

Those beds are alot deeper than they look too because we dug out about 2ft of soil before filling them in. Can't wait to see what they look like on 6 months time.

Any of you had or have a 'Blah' day??