Green Girl Gardener

Afternoon lovely people who kindly take the time to read my ramblings. I do hope you’re all having a good weekend.

I’m aware that I have probably written more posts not to do with gardening than I have that are to do with gardening, which may seem odd given the title of my blog. It seems that I have quite a few passions, and they’re all spilling out on to my blog. I didn’t really realise this until I started telling you all about the things that are important to me. Quite simply, I’m writing down what happens to be falling out of my head at the particular time that I come to write. Hope you don’t mind!

Today, however, I have been at one with nature, revelling in what is probably one of the last times I’ll be able to get out there without freezing my toes and fingers off. It did try to rain a couple of times while I was out there, but it must’ve got annoyed with me ignoring it and it took its rainy self off in a huff.

What I really wanted to do was tidy up our newly created bistro area.

This is what it looked like in early June. Crazy huh! This is after we’d paid to have someone cut back all the trees too! It took a lot of hard work to clear this, but I had a vision of how it could look, so I ignored the back pain and forged ahead.

I haven’t done any maintenance on it for a few weeks so first thing this morning it had quite a few leaves on it and fox poo! The fox seems to regard it as a giant litter tray!

Not a major difference, but you can see it looks tidier. It took quite a while to do that, I wish it looked more impressive! There is a massive difference between June and now though.

I pottered around after this and did some deadheading and general weeding. We have a delivery coming next week (weather permitting) and I wanted to clear the area ready for it. More on that soon. As an aside, I bought a hoe earlier in the year and couldn’t work out how it was better than getting down on your hands and knees and pulling weeds, but today, when I had a reasonably big area to clear it really came into its own.

After I’d turned the soil, a chirpy chappy came down to inspect the work and check if I’d turned up some lunch.

These photos are zoomed in, but he was pretty close to me. If I moved too quickly he flew off into next door’s trees and sang beautifully for me, but would come back down once I was still again.

Now I have to admit to having had a near failure in the garden. A couple of weeks ago I decided that, as the hot weather had passed, it would be safe to plant out my Berberis which I bought from Hop Pocket out near Worcester. It had beautiful red leaves edged with gold ….

…… but something has gone wrong! I don’t know if it didn’t like the kind of soil we have or if it was still too hot for it or if I gave it too much water, or not enough water, but today I decided to dig it back up and put it back in a pot to see if I can revive it. It’s still really prickly so I think there’s life left in it yet.

The poor thing looks really sorry for itself and I feel like I’ve let it down, but I hope I can show you another photo in a few weeks of it looking much happier. If I succeed in nursing it back to health I think I’ll keep it in a container.

Gardening brings me such happiness and peace, but this is the downside, when something doesn’t work. Keep your fingers crossed for it folks!