Garden Centre

Saturday, August 25, 2007

The downside …

Himself has a week off work, early in September, and guess what we’re doing? Quick trip to Madrid? Touring the English Vineyards? Enjoying the Indian summer delights of our home city – Brighton?

Nope, we’re filling a skip. This is the deep dark reality of gardening, the cold lower layer where the nasty things lurk that nobody tells you about when you’re skylarking around in the shallows, enjoying yourself and thinking the summer will last forever. (Cue the Jaws music)...

Because for summer to keep arriving, somebody has to get out there and be evil.

Here’s my list:

1. Prune back apple tree by eight feet (yup – the trees are at least thirty years old and were nearly twenty feet tall when we moved in. They are not productive and shade the whole garden but, unless we want to hire a tree surgeon, we’re stuck with them. If the previous owners had pruned properly we wouldn’t have such a mess, but the trunks are huge up to about twelve feet, so we’ve little choice but to keep taking off the tops and kidding ourselves that the two kilos of apples we get a year from both trees combined are worth it. Yeah, right …)

2. Remove wild rose (it wasn’t wild but it suckered out when I wasn’t looking and now it has whippy shoots about seven feet long and spines like a porcupine) wearing full protective clothing because it is vicious!

3. Get rid of Euonymus – we have three in the garden, two are great, the third is just a big, ugly green monster. We grew them all from cuttings about twelve years ago and I wish we hadn’t been so proud of our horticultural skills that we stuck them all in the ground. I’m a much more ruthless gardener now!

And that will just about fill a skip, I think. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a gardener. I’d much rather be admiring the Gaudi cathedral and looking forward to paella ….





(skip picture by Mark Hillary used under creative commons attribution licence, 'cos my skip hasn't arrived yet!)

Labels: garden makeovers, garden planning, removing plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:15 AM

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