187E - October: evaluating and making plans

 You plant your bulbs in October, move and/or divide your plants and evaluate the past gardening year. At least, I do. My gardening year starts in October.

The good news is that I am able to get my spade into the ground, deeper than 1cm and without giving myself a hernia.

The less good news is that I have lost several plants, they have 'simply'

Let's try it over here

vanished this year. Always sad...

And some of my plants are a bit sad themselves, like my climbing hydrangea. I did ask the grower: will it go against my metal arbour? Yes. Well...not! So it had to go somewhere else, but where, since I have no walls. In the end I planted it in the corner of my waterbutt/greenhouse.

It could be the soil in that part of the garden, for my Trachelospermum,  Hedera and Actinidia don't thrive there either, despite giving them organic fertiliser. Growl. The couch grass does very well there. Deeper growl.

Something like this

   Anyway. Plans!

Finally I think to have found a way to use those expensive silver coloured crinkly 'tomato canes', which cause you to be extremely careful not to blind yourself, and which my tomatoes hated.  "You want us to grow up those? Tsk! Give us some rope, please!" 

   I have put them in a circle (different heights). No fear for my eyes any longer and when the sun hits them they are an installation worthy of Charlie Dimmock, that brings much needed height to that part of my fire border (because the tall yellow Heleniums I planted there are part of my Vanished Plants).

This was before I put the coloured bottles on.

Another plan is to finish the interior of my greenhouse. During the summer it was too hot to do that, but now it's doable. So more French bark on the ground, finish the raised beds for the veg and keep weeding, as that poxy 

mini clover is now coming up from under my anti-weed cloth I tell you, unbelievable!

My preciousssss

Plan number 3: rose arches. My roses in the soil aren't doing that well to be honest, but the rose in the large planter is doing marvellously. So who is going to stop me putting my climbing roses in planters against the arches? No one, that's who.

Any more plans? Absolutely! My Eleaeagnus Ebbingei can honestly be called a success. She has grown enormously, pulls in the bumblebees with her tiny scented flowers and now drapes dramatically over the path next to the frog pond, so that it is hard to walk there. That does give me an exciting jungle experience, but makes it very hard to trim the grass there. So I have decided to lift her canopy. I have no idea if she will like that (but I will). But I will have to wait until the end of winter, so you will have to be patient.

It's so fluffy that I want to snuggle in there.

Despite it pouring buckets for hours already, my garden makes me very happy.

Have a good weekend!

Renée