An Open Letter To The Property Manager

Dear PM,

I don't know how much you pay your "gardening" contractors to service Jurassic Towers, but whatever their fee, it's too much. I genuinely have not seen such a bunch of ignorant muppets in quite some time, and I teach BTEC Level 1 courses.

Firstly, there's the frequency with which they visit. It's probably not sufficient to drop by for an hour and a half every two months to keep this garden looking good. Hell, not even good - serviceable and not looking like a good spot for fly-tipping would be a start.


The dock plants were in full flower and up to waist height. I was concerned that Basement and Ceiling Cats would get lost in there. In fact, it looked like the Serengeti, without the benefit of grazing ungulates to keep the vegetation down.

I'm not a fan of grass - I don't like to see a preened monoculture. I'd love to have a wildflower meadow for next-door's son and his cousins to play in. The clover was starting to look nice. But you need to make a decision with this sort of thing. Either you're going to have a lawn, which you need to keep relatively well trimmed, or you're going to have a wildflower meadow, which you shouldn't mow down to an inch high every two months. If you want a monoculture, then mowing regularly will actually help with this, as you'll be trimming off the flowers of the other plants before they can set seed. A gardener would know this.


Also, what's with the mowing? I have a washing line up on the lawn, with a fully portable post to hold up the line in the middle. Most normal non-morons can move a pole such as this, but your rent-an-idiot decided to mow around it. Then he strimmed around it. This is why I offered to take on the maintenance of the entire garden in return for a lawnmower and a small discount on the rent. Because I could do a much better job. I'd even give you stripes - I mow damn fine stripes in a lawn.

In my brief foray into gardening, the most basic jobs we did were to mow, weed and blow. These cretins have barely managed to mow properly (the lawn looks like Hubster's chin when he's let his beard grow for a while and he's just hacked it back with his clippers before shaving). The extent of their weeding consisted of removing all my summer bulbs (what the fcuk is it with these people?!) while leaving the dandelions, groundsel and feverfew to grow big and strong). And there has been no tidying up, use of blower, etc. In fact, having trimmed some of the hedge, they left the clippings all over the pavement, which makes us look like bad neighbours.

In short, this is pretty much why your client, my landlord, is in such dire financial straits. Because both of you show absolutely no indication that you understand what value-for-money is. He bought an absolute white elephant when he bought Jurassic Towers, and now he can't bring himself to inject any funds into it to make it habitable. You, in the meantime, are paying some of the worst gardeners I have seen, to not maintain the garden. You're throwing our rent money down the drain, and it's not fair.

Oh, and they knocked over two of my plant pots while mowing. A good gardener can turn a petrol mower on a sixpence. If this continues, I shall be lining the gravelled area with a row of Agave ferox, to focus their attention on using the lawnmower more precisely.

Kind regards, etc.

Irrigating Baskets

With the hosepipe ban, it has been awkward to water the pots and baskets hanging on the walls - I'm often watered more than the plants! So it was clear I needed to sort out some irrigation from the water butt. The pressure wasn't great enough coming out of the water butt to force water up to the higher pots, and @smallcasserole pointed out that if it was then I'd have invented a perpetual motion machine, so in the end it was easier to get some kind of pump than to change the laws of physics.


This little chap has proven very useful. It's not a direct link to the water butt, but it takes very little time to fill, and a few pumps are plenty to force the water up to the top pots.


I'm hoping the jasmine will grow a bit more, to cover the hoses. It's a kludge, but it's worked well, and the hose can always be hooked up to the mains taps when the ban has been lifted (though I rather like recycling our minging shower water).

The Potting Shed

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to shift some things around in the garden. I'd allowed myself to spread out and take over a corner next to the house for the greenhouse, all my pots, compost, paving slabs and so on. It looked messy, and now that we have nice neighbours whose interest in horticulture involves being outside in the garden and maybe putting in some raised beds, rather than hydroponically growing cannabis, I was keen to reel it back in.

So Hubster broke into the cellar. We have access from inside, but there's an external access that used to have a padlock on. The padlock was no match for a Glaswegian with a 2lb geological hammer.


There was a bucketload of dust to clear out of the way before I could get anything into the cellar. But I had the perfect location for a potting bench (one of the lab benches I snaffled from my old biology lab before it was demolished), and plenty of space for storage.


The Aussie upstairs expressed a desire to get a home brewing kit set up, and I've made sure at least half the space is available for such worthy endeavours.


Putting the compost, pots and tools in the cellar has freed up the greenhouse to actually accommodate plants. So I suppose I'd better get on with propagating. The greenhouse was easily moved to one side of the steps, next to our grey-water butt. I remember that being where my first greenhouse (more a plastic-covered shelving system!) was put, so it's nice to have that return to the original layout.

Today In The Garden

This afternoon was a time for sitting and enjoying the weather, and the light was beautiful.


This is a sight you're all used to seeing - the little paved area with the fountain in the background. But the view in the opposite direction takes some getting used to:


I added in the paving slabs yesterday (like the ones next to the fountain, they are from my parents' garden, so will come with us when we eventually move house). It makes walking through the garden in my slippers a bit easier first thing in the morning. We've finally got to the stage where it is warm enough to regularly eat breakfast outside, so slipper-clad perambulation is an important consideration.

Wordless Wednesday: Outdoor Office

We Dug

Last weekend we finished the gravelling of the garden. Hubster dealt with the surprisingly tough job of putting in the edging next to the turf, and I hefted much of the tonne of gravel, aided by one of our neighbours. We dug a little pond and transferred in the water from the other pond, including a rather annoyed damselfly larva (who will no doubt take care of mosquito larvae come the summer).

So here are all the photos. We're getting a picnic bench to go in the centre of the gravel, as it's a lovely sun trap until about mid-late afternoon - we'll stain it blue to match the rest of the wooden things. There's going to be a breeze-block structure for our barbecue over in the back left hand corner, and Hubster is looking forward to barbecuing all manner of meat this summer. The maple to the left of the gravelled area has lots of bird feeders hanging from it, and I've counted robins, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, long-tailed tits, goldfinches and chaffinches.








The drought is going to be pretty tough on Jurassic Park this year with a hosepipe ban coming in, but we've got water butts set up, have figured out that our shower water is nearly enough to water the entire garden (and of course some plants like euphorbias and the Wollemia won't need it every day), and Thames Water have said drip micro-irrigation systems are fine as they're very water-efficient, so I'll be ordering one of them. I think there's reason to be optimistic - I just hope we're not restricted to standpipes...

We Dig

About four years ago there was a really crappy television show called "Bonekickers", all about crime-fighting archaeologists. I switched off after the following exchange:

"What do we do now?"
"We dig."

Anyway, yesterday, we dug.

Now that I am once more the only resident of Jurassic Towers with an interest in horticulture, the property manager has been quite busy getting builders in to repair the damage to the upstairs flats, and we now have new neighbours next door (after nine months alone) and above (after a year and a half). This means it's time to rethink my occupancy of the garden. After our upstairs neighbour died, and it was clear no new tenants were coming in, I spread out underneath the fire escape.


It was a rather crappy bit of the garden to be honest, and only really good for taking candid shots of Hubster through the leaves as he sat at the table. So, I wondered whether the property manager would be amenable to me gravelling over part of the lawn. The answer was "hell yes". And you'll see why:


Here's the lawn, with Hubster for scale. I'm not a big fan of lawns - I don't like big monocultures. That said, this was mostly clover and buttercups, with a bit of moss thrown in for good measure. And of course with a maple, an apple tree and a tree of heaven hell forming a triangle, this bit of lawn was never going to get the nutrients it needed. It took about four hours to dig everything up, then we broke for a shower, and a trip to the garden centre to get membrane and a massive cream tea. We laid the membrane as we were losing the light.


We pegged the membrane in places, and put plants on top in others. This morning, I started placing some of the plants. This was harder than I thought, and some of them look really bad at the moment, like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree.


Next weekend the gravel is arriving, and it'll look a whole lot better then, I hope. We're putting in a little pond, and I have plans for a larger table and chairs (maybe a picnic bench?) in the middle of the gravel.


All of it looks rather miserable, not least because it was tipping it down with rain. I was in waterproofs, but after two hours out this morning I was soaked to the skin. I'm really rather ready for spring to happen so the plants can get a bit of colour on them. It's on its way - I can tell - the Metasequoia has buds on it, and the Acacia has little flowers forming. I even saw a bumblebee yesterday morning sunning itself.

Tune in next week for the arrival of the gravel...

A Different Kind Of Gardening...

Hasn't this blog been quiet? A number of things really - work has been sufficiently time-sapping that I've been leaving in the dark and getting home in the dark, even as the evenings are getting lighter. I put Jurassic Park to bed in October half-term, with reports that we were heading for some cold weather - it never materialised, but I couldn't be bothered to unfleece everything. So for nearly four months the garden has been wrapped up and cosy.

But it appears not everyone at Jurassic Towers was holding off the gardening. Do you remember the horrible builders over summer 2011 who smashed my Euphorbia and who may even have smashed Bastard I? Turns out they were putting in a rather elaborate raised bed upstairs. They were also putting in insulation, reflective panels, extractor fans and a hydroponics system. Oh yes, dear readers, they made a cannabis farm.

Eventually the police had enough evidence to obtain a warrant, and boy was it quite a haul! We were shown photos of the "crops", and it looked like one of those sweeping shots over the rainforest that you see on nature documentaries. This was all several weeks ago, and since then we've had significantly nicer builders in renovating the flats. They had a skip, and we were able to see some of the "kit" being used.


Firstly, there are an awful lot of pots aren't there? We were surprised by this - the pots all had compost in them, and good quality stuff too. I was under the impression that hydroponics involved very little compost - perhaps they just had a capillary mat or something. Nevertheless there would have been an awful lot of irrigation needed. You'll also notice the large drums - we think these were part of the extractor system. Apparently increasingly cannabis farmers are using fans to pump that distinctive aroma out through chimneys and so on. There was also a lot of foil-covered board, to reflect the heat back in to the plants, and the obligatory high-wattage lights.

When I teach my BTEC Plant Science unit, I find a lot of the most well-researched articles online on plant nutrition and especially micronutrient balances are from the cannabis growers. They've really studied very hard, and I have to hand it to them for maximising growth in usually distinctly non-ideal conditions for growing plants. I'm just puzzled about one thing - we think they've run their lights 24 hours a day. Now, as far as I recall, plants require a period of dark to be able to process all the products from the light-dependent stage of photosynthesis. If they don't remove the products, then basically photosynthesis slows. Surely it would be in the interest of cannabis farmers to maximise photosynthesis.

So I'm wondering, do cannabis growers have periods of light and dark, or do they grow their crop at less than maximum efficiency? Or has the need for light and dark been shown to be rubbish?

My Parents' Problem Patch

Two years ago, my parents had their garden completely redesigned. Some sections of the garden look lovely - there is a swathe of lavender in the middle of the garden, and the colour is gorgeous. The west-facing border has taken off so well that my mum probably has enough Alchemilla mollis to supply every garden in Nottinghamshire. However, some of the designer's ideas were, umm, bewildering, to say the least. Where Mum said she loved every colour of flowers except yellow, she now has a load of Euphorbia and the aforementioned Alchemilla. The ground underneath the lawn was not levelled properly, and it will never be able to double as an impromptu croquet lawn or putting green, as my grandfather's lawn used to.

We don't talk about the chamomile lawn. It used to be where the recliner now sits:


And in an east-facing border, we have a Camellia. As far as I remember, it's pretty much the only advice given on the label when you buy a Camellia: Don't plant in an east-facing border, and don't feed after midnight.

The east-facing border is a bit of a problem though. You can probably spot it from here - it's the ruddy great big copper beech tree. So it's shady, dry and really crappy soil. My mantra when talking to my mother has become "More manure, more manure, more manure", but it's clear that the plants need to be sorted a bit.


Doesn't look great, does it? The Cotinus hasn't grown at all in the two years it'd been in, nor, really, has the Mahonia. Fatsia japonica seems happy enough, as does the Buddleja, but there's a lot of miserable looking soil.

Both Rob and Victoria have made some suggestions. Sarcococca could be a winner, as could Brunnera - I think Mum would like some bigger shrubs though, to hide the fence a bit. I also mentioned Liriope muscari, and perhaps many of the plants listed on the Plants for Shade website, but she might prefer to hear it from you lot.

Any more ideas? I know what's in the books, but personal experiences are always something my mother takes notice of. They live just outside Nottingham, so it's pretty much USDA zone 8, and the house is on the south side of the garden.

With Fronds Like These Who Needs Anemones?

Just over two weeks ago, Hubster and I went over to visit Victoria, accompanied by Rob. There was an ulterior motive - the presence of two Big Strong Boys was requested to help move some pots, and one of those pots contained a Cycas revoluta that Victoria was giving to me.

We were also able to meet Mario and Luigi the kittens (who are as adorable as they look in the photos), and eat scones and clotted cream.

So here is Bastard III, resplendent in the garden:


Thank you so much, Victoria - it is a marvellous specimen, and looks very happy in between the Wollemi pine and Halocarpus bidwilli.