Expert diggers

Meet Izzy

Izzy appeared like lightening out of nowhere.  She’s an expert digger, which is handy when you’re trying to dig out a new flower border. Not so good when she decides it might be fun to race over your recently planted seedlings.  She  belongs to Tom, one of the cowmen.  He’s new and a student, so I don’t know how long he’ll be around.  Izzy seems to have free reign of the farmyard.  And my garden.  I’m not best pleased about that.  My feelings for Izzy swing wildly from pain in the neck to gorgeous fun-loving, attention seeking hound.  She’s quite obedient; she comes when you call her, she sits when you tell her, she lies when you tell her – but only because she thinks you’re going to throw her  a stick, or a divot of mud.  She sits at your feet looking doe eyed at you, expectantly. She doesn’t know how to sit still for more than 5 seconds.  She’s constantly on the look out for fun and games.  I’ve lost a pair of leather gardening gloves and only just caught her before she ran off with my hand-fork.  I have half chewed plastic plant pots and bamboo canes strewn across the garden.  The only way to get rid of her is for me to go inside.  Which kind of makes it difficult to do the gardening.

I’ve been looking at a border of ugly shrubs for two years now and decided I’d definitely get rid of them, even though they’d been growing there for about 10 years.  Well, after 10 years growth you can imagine what a job it was going to be.  I decided to start by cutting the tops off, as you would.

This is what it looked like after I lopped off the tops, you can just see some of the stumps.

Once the tops had gone I thought I’d have a bit of fun and mark out where the new border would be.  There hadn’t  been a border there before, the shrubs were just growing in the grass, if you could call it grass; ivy, brambles and weeds more like.  The ground is absolutely rock hard and chock full of a web of roots.  Once I’d marked out the rough border I decided I’d tackle some of the stumps.  After two days on and off I still hadn’t even unearthed one of them.  I felt like an archaeologist digging and scraping round individual roots so that I could cut them in pieces with the loppers.  Still, I thought it would be worth the effort, after all nothing could possibly grow in it if I didn’t.  I predicted weeks, maybe even months to get rid of the 5 stumps…

And then, completely out of the blue, I received an offer I couldn’t refuse.  An offer of a digger and some chains.  I think I may love my landlady.  I beamed from ear to ear when she said “leave it to me”.  I went back inside to get on with some spring cleaning, expecting to see her sometime next week. Then 5 minutes later I heard Kim screech with delight “mummy, mummy they’re here!”. Do boys ever grow out of being impressed with diggers I wonder?  I couldn’t believe my eyes, not only were they here, they already had half an Elaeagnus out of the ground!  And another fifteen minutes later they’d pulled out a Blackthorne, an Olearia and another couple of Elaeagnus – and, dropped on a massive load of top soil to fill the holes!

This is how the border was beginning to come together yesterday, after the removal

I couldn’t sacrifice the Buddleia though.  How can you not love a shrub that attracts so many butterflies during the summer months?  And it’s so easy to prune back to a manageable size in spring that there’s no worrying that it’ll be blocking out the sunlight in a year or two’s time.  As you can see, the garden’s a complete mess now.

As the sun went down I'd just about begun to dig in some manure

I soon gave up digging in the manure though, because even with the roots gone, the ground was still as hard as rock.  Compacted soil is much easier to break up with a mattock.  Luckily one of my friends is a Cornish hedger and owns just such a tool, so I didn’t have to wait until I could afford one, I just borrowed hers  Thanks J!  And today I have calloused and blistered hands to prove that I’ve been very busy mattocking!  I didn’t take a picture of how it’s looking this evening, it’s so grey and miserable and was virtually dark by the time I came inside I didn’t think I would do it justice.  Hopefully the sun will be shining tomorrow, and I may have even cleared up and mowed the lawn, so that I can show you my teensy tiny garden in all its muddy glory.

Tonight I think I’m going to be dreaming about the plants I want to put in here.  I definitely want to grow climbers along the fence, including honeysuckle and roses  - I’m going for an informal cottagey look.  It might seem a bit unimaginative, but I do live in the middle of a farm, and for this setting it’s difficult to come up with anything more appropriate!  If you have any favourite plants let me know what they are – I need lots of ideas, as many as I can get.

I’m off to find the hand cream now.  See you tomorrow.

Love Stephie x