Planting bulbs – or great intentions to, anyway…. 

This week we started off with grand plans to brighten up our wooded area (long-term we plan to put picnic benches here so guests can sit and eat, or enjoy a drink, while looking at the view). There’s a strip of land between our fence and the boundary hedge that’s visible from the road but that’s been completely taken over with weeds. We’ve walked past other properties with swathes of daffodils in their gardens, and thought we’d do the same. So we duly bought a variety of bulbs from a wholesaler back in late July and sat back, waiting to start work. 

The bulbs took an extra month to arrive due to all the general shipping and stock issue at the moment, and so we were quite surprised to see just how many we’d ordered (4 sacks online doesn’t quite feel the same as 100kg arriving on your doorstep). But it’s a fairly big area when you include the triangle at the end of the wood, and so we figured we’d be ok.  

It started well too – with John clearing the area of weeds during the week, and we set an early alarm on Saturday to make the best use of the day.

We were down in the wood by 8am, which is when it all started to fall apart. The ground was (is) completely full of roots and so compacted from years of being left, that it was practically impossible to dig deep enough. We gave it a good attempt too – but after 3 hours of digging (and a little swearing), and seemingly-endless root pulling with limited progress, we called Jewsons to see if they had anything that would save the day. It took only a few minutes to determine that a heavy-duty rotavator was likely to save us an inordinate amount of time (we’d only managed to dig 2m to half-depth, out of 50m+), and so we thankfully packed everything up, after arranging to call back on Monday to sort the machine hire.  

After a quick break to our local milk shed Daisy’s Dairy for milkshake and pumpkins (my favourite autumn vegetable – it drives John made sometimes the number I bring home!!), we took the opportunity to start the other ‘non-urgent’ jobs we never seem to get to – like tidying up the kitchen garden and cutting back our weary-looking abandoned willow in the front courtyard. Luckily I have most of Friday off work to get started with the rotavator!! 

Sunday was always planned to be slightly different – one where we learnt that 5:40am really does exist at the weekend! Weston-Super-Mare is just less than an hour’s drive from us (and a great place for a break for anyone coming along the M5), and so it was an easy decision when John planned to run the Super-Half marathon. Unfortunately, once we were there and he’d warmed up, he sensibly decided that an injury flare meant it was too risky to run (he does have 5 days of aerating and scarifying the lawns ahead of him!!), so instead of taking part, we took the opportunity to have a wander round instead. Weston-Super-Mare had a beautiful misty coastline and some lovely art deco architecture typical of British beach towns, and the pup loved burning off some energy running around the sand! So perhaps not as productive a day as we’d hoped, but still fun nonetheless. And – weather permitting – the upcoming week is going to be a little intense with full-on garden jobs (John) and a trip to Northampton (me), so half a day off is probably a good thing…