Danger! Man-eating apple trees!

Wth the garden still not deer-proofed we've built these rather odd looking cages to protect the new apple trees for the time being. I'm told that deer love the sweet bark of young apple trees and would nibble at the tender trunks. Hence the slightly OTT cages.

Not resting on our laurels!

The first section of the deer fence is in! It stretches from the back righthand corner of the garden to the road. Most of it is hidden behind the existing laurel hedge.We've planted some new laurels in the corner to fill in the gap there. Won't be long, hopefully, before they've filled out to hide that bit of the fence. Thank you to our helper for the back-breaking, root-battling task of planting the new laurels!

But one secure boundary won't keep out the deer - we need to get the other sides secure before we can do any more planting.

Welcome!

Primroses in the orchard

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One becomes four

Today we planted three Betula utilis jacuemontii (Himalayan birch) to join a rather lonely looking silver birch. The original tree, now on the right, was given to us by our children for our 25th wedding anniversary and was careful transported from our previous house. I think it looks very much happier with some company.

And here they are ...

200 box plants in 14 rows of 14 plants with four left over.

Ready to be planted around the new beds - as soon as we create them.

How many box plants does it take to make a parterre?

This is design of the simple parterre we are planning for the middle of the back lawn. It will have low box hedges around the edge. But how many do we need?



1 square = 0.5 m

Total perimeter = 40 m

Number of plants per m = 5

Number of plants needed = 40 x 5 = 200

That's a lot!


I knew that one day my maths teaching experience would come in useful!

All help gratefully received

The magpies, woodpeckers and rooks have been pecking at the lawn, presumably looking for insects. In the process they pull up clumps of moss. Today I raked all the moss into a large trug. Thank you birds - keep foraging!

Monster compost heap

This is what visitors see when they come through the gate - a monster compost heap (on right of the picture), with a baby compost heap forming (on left), and three sheds! This is definitely an area that needs attention.

Oh deer!

 

The first time we saw a deer in the garden we thought it was quite cute – until we realised it had eaten all the roses in our first attempt at a flower bed. Since then they have become regular visitors - strolling along the back boundary, nibbling the rhodendrons (even though deer supposedly don't like rhodendrons), pausing for a sit down in the middle of lawn as if they are in Richmond Park, or bounding across the lawn on the way to create mayhem somewhere else.

If we're going to have any flowers we need to keep them out. So the first step is deer fencing ... not around the whole garden because we don't want to live in a deer fortress, but to hopefully to keep the back garden deer-free.

Starting from here

We moved into this house in January 2010, about a year ago. Since then we have cut back the overgrown hedges, cut down some out-of-control conifers, pulled up barrow-loads of sedge grass and created a mountainous compost heap. We've let in the light and created an almost blank canvas.

Background

The garden is 0.7 acres, with the house positioned neatly in the centre of the plot. The soil is clay and is wet to very wet for a lot of the year. We have wonderful oak trees and other native species, but also some very tall conifers. The boundaries are leylandii hedging (its days are numbered), laurel and rhodendron. To one side of the house is a small rather sad orchard. The rest is currently mostly lawn/moss.


These are the "before" pictures.