Gardening

[plaques]

Two notes
(1) most councils have stopped the green waste collection (either free or paid for ) and closed the tips, if your compost space is nil or overflowing you have a problem
(2) Planting near nursing homes, etc, keeps the undesirables out.

(1) Pendle are still collecting green bins. Moss takes 3 years+ to compost down. I could always bury it but that would releases too many coronary fumes.
(2) That's why we have one plus dozens of berberis,

[Tizer]

Green bins are not being collected here in Somerset so they can concentrate on household wast and food waste (and there's a lot of panic-bought food waste now). Spread your moss out and allow it to dry and you can find then uses for it in the future (in hanging baskets etc). Throw some of it into your bushes so that birds can collect it for nesting. Tits love it!

Spring has come early and we've had all sorts of plants flowering very early. Celandine is everywhere showing it's beautiful yellow flowers - and some people call it a weed! Borage is in flower. So is rosemary.

[Stanley]

Here's my Spring pic. All of a sudden the buds on the Lilac have burst. Nice...

[plaques]

A bit of destructive heavy gardening in yesterday's sunshine. A lonesome pine slightly in the way of a good view but had been planted directly above the electricity lines to both our and our neighbours houses. Our neighbour's tidying of his stretch had brought the cables to the surface meaning they may have to be reset right from the lane boundary.

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'First expose the roots. Not too hard work but time consuming.

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. Fasten up chain and pulling tackle. Then lop off the remaining roots. A quiet pull and its down.

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. Nothing to it. Chain saw out ready to cut up into blocks.

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. Mrs P tidying up Job done.

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[Stanley]

Tidy! Handy woman to have around!

[Tizer]

You've got a fantastic view from your garden, Plaques.

We always enjoy our garden and it's an even greater benefit in these times of lockdown. Flower and leaf buds are opening, there's fresh growth everywhere and life is being renewed. The tadpoles are twiddling their way back and forth across our pond and we saw a young newt in the evening gliding sedately through the clear water. When we had a bucket of pond weed from a neighbour to start our pond we saw there were several newt eggs on the fronds. We know there are at least three newts in the pond! Pond skaters and water boatmen are busy. Bees, wasps and hoverflies are visiting the garden and we see lots of lovely hovering bee fly, behaving like miniature humming birds. Bee fly

[Stanley]

Sounds idyllic Tiz!

[Tizer]

People who work as gardeners have advantages at the moment. They carry on working, are outside, wear gloves, aren't frightened of rain and can chat to other people from a distance. We know a father and son who live together and work together as gardeners.

[Stanley]

Street sweepers are in a similar position Tiz, at least they are in Barlick. Grass cutters could be the same.

[plaques]

Next doors laurel tree overhanging our border now in full flower. I'm not an expert on these bushes but I think its a cherry laurel. At about 12 ft high its about half the height of the other darker green leaf laurels that are also part of their edge. An extremely poisonous plant that you don't want to be eating.
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[Stanley]

Isn't it strange that something so fresh and beautiful can be a poison....

[Stanley]

I cut the ladslove back, cropped the old mint stalks and pruned the lilac where it was encroaching on the footpath and retired into the house! (I'll sweep the paths today I promise..... )

[Stanley]

What an engineer's tidy garden looks like......

[Stanley]

Here's my caterpillar home in the back yard, looks very healthy. Anyone know what it is?

[Tizer]

Mrs Tiz says it's probably a member of the dandelion family (Compositae) so you can expect a yellow flower and then it might be possible to identify it. It's a big family and they're not easy to distinguish. The plant equivalent of the birder's LBJ, little brown job! I'll make a guess that the plant on the right of the photo is a hart's tongue fern. At this time of year they have lovely unfurling new leaves; the mature leaves are a leathery dark green.

[Stanley]

I asked Susan, she is good with plants. She said she doesn't know but expects it to have a pink flower. I shall look after it and report!

[Tizer]

Tension mounts....

[Stanley]

Amazing how healthy it is considering it only has a toehold in a crack!

[Tizer]

A buddleia bush can grow in a tiny hole like that, and on the top of a wall too!

[plaques]

Buddleia one of the biggest pests on the Railways. Actually on my way back from the MOT garage, a small 1 mile detour to do some shopping but that's another story, I saw an identical plant in a pavement / wall nick. Anybody watching would have thought I'd lost my marbles staring at this weed, nothing out of the ordinary there though. All the surrounding gardens and patches of land all had a good display of common dandelions but this was a 1 off. As Tizer says 'tension mounting'.

[Tizer]

Keep a lookout for this one! LINK

[Stanley]

Now that would worry me if it was growing in the back yard!

[Whyperion]

I tend to pull up (others will spray to death) plants like that. Problem is they produce so many seeds that ground can get over-run with them, its a fine line to providing a host to moth or butterfly / hover fiy larvae and having too much rampant greenery. Trying to explain to some folk that an overgrown weed patch is benifically good. Of course the amount of seeds for new plants has come about due to pest consumption ( it might get leaf miners) or animal eating - goats, cattle, sheep and so on that would trim the foliage and or flowers to more manageable amounts but we dont have sheep in our urban gardens now.

[Stanley]

Don't agree. A weed is a plant in the wrong place. Live and let live.



Here it is this morning, doing well.

[plaques]

We are fortunate that in our garden we have hundreds of Bluebells. At this time of year they give some colour to the more shaded areas but can be a nuisance when they start self seeding everywhere. What struck me this year was the number of white Albino bluebells. Normally we get the odd one or two but this years they are into dozens. They are supposedly quite rare in the wild which applies to our garden.

“Many people may have seen them but do not know what they are.” Wild white bluebells are very rare in Britain, with one white bluebell only occurring in one of every 10,000 flowers. The Wildlife and Countryside Act has ensured the bluebell is a protected flower, making it illegal to collect bluebells from the wild.

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