Flower Garden Epic

 After seven years of living here at Blueday Cottage the back garden is still more or less a clearing in the jungle. Every year the clearing gets slightly larger, and this year I am determined it will get much larger. At the bottom of the yard is an area of wasteland that I tend to weed once a year and then neglect, despite promising myself that things will change. This year is the year I am turning it into a flower garden. First I decided to make a path.

My thoughts are that if I put a garden bench at the end of the path I will go and sit on it to have a nice cup of tea, then immediately get up again to weed because it is impossible for a gardener to sit and look at weeds from close up for any length of time. This is the true purpose of garden benches. I started with the path, and then I had to do some digging for the wide part at the end where the bench will go. Because I am working with a slope I had to dig at one end, and then build up the other end with a rock wall. I go to visit Paul every couple of weeks and fill up the car with rocks for my wall building antics. His land is 99% rocks so basically I am just clearing off his front lawn for him.

For the low side of the path I have been collecting all the stones and bits of old asphalt and half bricks that I dig up in the garden, and use them as fill, then I covered them with the soil I dug up from the other side of the path where I am digging into the hill.

I think I am nearly done with the path. I just have to haul some heavy rocks from one side of the garden to the other to shore up the high side.

Meanwhile, back in autumn I ordered a lot of flower seeds, and planted the ones that would survive the winter. I have planted out larkspur, yarrow and blue cornflowers, and have a plantation of purple cornflowers to put in when I have hacked out some of the jungle on the lower side of the path. It has been a very wet winter so far, and the jungle is flourishing.

The cornflower plantation on my potting bench

I finally finished my summer painting job in the first week of winter, so the last wall of the house has been painted. I had to take down the clothesline to do it. That clothesline has always been too short - I have to fold the ends of my sheets over to hang them up, and then they take longer to dry, in what is already the shady side of the house. I thought at the time that I could only have a short line because there is a drainpipe in the way, however it occurred to me about two years ago that the line would pass well in front of the drainpipe, and it has only taken that long for me to get around to doing something about it.

So I bought a very long clothesline last week, and put it up on the weekend, with Red helping me by holding the end of the measuring tape and putting up the long rail and threading the clothesline through. I think we did an excellent job. I absolutely love the feeling I get when I DIY a thing. However annoying it was in the process, the satisfaction of doing a thing myself is priceless.

It is pouring with rain right now but tomorrow is forecast dry and I am so excited to wash the sheets and hang them out to dry tomorrow:)

It was tomorrow several days ago now, and I was just as excited as I thought I would be to hang so many sheets and towels on my new long clothesline. How wonderful when life is so joyous:)

In other news I tried to clean a light fitting tonight and broke it so now I am sitting in the dark to write this.. which should be a lesson to me not to clean things. I should have learned this by now..

In other, other news I have been writing this post since June, and maybe now is the time to post it. I am still slowly making progress on the new flower garden. It is currently mostly a calendula garden, for reasons of when I weeded this whole space, all I left were the self-seeded calendulas, and they are so happy now to have lots of space and light.

Calendulas are a wonderful medicinal herb. When the children were little and had sticky eyes - which for some reason so many children do when they are sick with anything, I would steep whole calendula heads in boiling water in a tea pot, then use the cooled water to bathe their sticky, irritated little eyes, and they would clear up really quickly. It's good for soothing eyes in general, as it is an anti-inflammatory. Used as a tea it also helps sore throats and colds in general. Its magical uses include repelling evil and inducing prophetic dreams. Also, "if a girl touches the petals of the marigold with her bare feet, she will understand the languages of birds." (Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs)

I have not attempted this last one, as I don't think I qualify as a girl anymore, but if anyone is willing to do the experiment, let me know..

My latest project is terracing the area of the hill right down next to the fence line at the bottom of the garden. While I was doing that I discovered that the lower 30cm or so of fence is covered by soil that has eroded down the slope over the years and is now busy trying to decompose the fence. The soil there is wonderful, loamy and filled with worms so I am slowly digging it out and hauling it back up the hill to fill in the terraces. I will have to make a permanent wall down there to save the fence. Maybe rocks from Paul's place, maybe landscaping bricks? There will be experimentation...

Meanwhile I have planted out a lot of cornflower and larkspur plants that I grew from seed in autumn, and now I am waiting for a couple of weeks until I can get all the seeds out and start the spring planting. So exciting!

What is going on in your gardens right now? Planting? Harvesting? DIY? Tell me all. I have missed your stories:)