thegreenerdream

The Importance of Being Organized.

May 19, 2015May 19, 2015mariamayfleming

We are in our third year of creating our garden and one of our most important tools is our garden planning book with notes and labels. When you start planning a garden it is great to make a lot of plans on paper as it saves time, effort and money. It is great to look through books and magazines for ideas and also think about what you want to use your garden for. Do you have to consider young kids, disabilities or pets? Do you plan to grow your own food or have a purely decorative space? Do you want a formal layout or a wild billowing mass of flowers and shrubs?

Our plans were for a wildlife friendly garden with lots of food plants and space for our teenagers and friends to hang out. The book has been helpful in keeping a record of our journey. We have for instance made notes in our diary part of the book about when we started digging the pond, what plants we put around it, What is doing well and what has had to be moved and so forth. It is a lot of fun to look back through the notes and see how much you have actually accomplished. Sometimes when you are creating a garden from scratch and also are renovating your whole house it is easy to lose track of the progress and only see a lot of half finished projects. This is when the book comes in very handy for a bit of reassurance.

One section contains all our orders and it is lovely to see this two page order from the spring of 2013. Future Forests in Cork have written at the bottom of it, under packing and courier;

We got the plants into one parcel so cheaper than quoted.

This was our main tree order and a lot of the trees are now taller than any of us and wider too. It is doubtful if any of them would fit into a parcel now, even on their own. The best advice we can give to anyone starting a garden is to buy your trees small. They soon catch up and grow bigger faster than the pot grown bigger expensive specimens, sometimes available at Garden centers. It is also very important to mulch around small trees. We use double layers of cardboard boxes and natural mulch like wood chippings or straw. It only needs topping up once a year. The trees can grow away without competition from smothering weeds and without drying out. This in combination with a generous helping of well rotted manure in the planting hole has set all our trees off to a good start. Our babies are growing up!

May 2014

May 2015

We have made a lot of planting plans for different areas of the garden with the plant labels attached to the pages. It is fun to be able to tell friends, when you divide and share a plant, what the botanical and common name are and what particular variety they are getting. It is also nice to be able to remove the unsightly labels from trees and shrubs, but still keep track of where the different varieties are planted.

Vegetables do better if they are moved around the plot and not grown in the same soil year after year. We have made quick sketches of the beds with what was growing in which bed each year. But we now have to come clean and tell you that we forgot to do this on paper before and kept it all in our heads, but now, while preparing this post we had to look back through photos of the garden to help our memories along. The ideal is to have a four year crop rotation, and we try to do this with the big groups like onions and brassicas. We also grow a lot of mixed vegetables and try different things for different years so hopefully we can keep on avoiding pests and diseases. Our book has some practical pockets in each section for storing plans like this.

We believe that it is essential to keep a record book of the garden and if you do you will soon find that you refer to it again and again. Happy gardening!

Designing mosaics.

May 13, 2015January 19, 2018mariamayfleming

The key to a successful mosaic project is planning. You need to think about colour combinations, how bright you want the space to be and what tiles you have on hand. Do you wish to incorporate mirrors or pieces of broken crockery? What feelings do you want to evoke in people seeing your mosaic? In our bathroom we wanted a bright, calm and happy atmosphere so we decided to make mosaics in a neutral colour scale with mostly natural stone colours, with some mild greens, blues and turquoise incorporated. We added a lot of mirrors and sections of bottle brick walls to get as much light as possible. Even though the bathroom only has one small window, it is now the brightest room in the house.

Woodland management on a small scale.

May 10, 2015May 10, 2015mariamayfleming

Our little woodland has had a complete makeover in the last few days. We had about 22 spruce that were planted in 1972. They were quite close together thus thin, tall and leggy. As the ground is boggy the wind had started to rock the roots and it was time for a change. We cut a lot of them quite high and used some of the cut trunks for crosspieces, creating supports for climbers. A lot of the logs will be used for firewood, some of the big thick ones will be supports in our conservatory and a few have been given to friends for their house renovation project.

As we have electric cables right next to our woodland we got a friend with a digger to come around and make sure no trees went on the wires or on the road. We had a lot of willow and other tree saplings in the woods and we moved them to a temporary safe location, out of reach of falling logs. Here you can see the two tree fellers hard at work.

After the felling was complete we were left with a lovely bright space ready to replant with trees, shrubs and ground-covers more beneficial to us. Our whole garden is based on the principals of forest gardening, where all plants have a purpose other than just aesthetics or fashion. They are planted in a way as to mimic young woodland with a canopy, shrub and ground cover layer. Plants are chosen for food production, wildlife, pollination, soil-improvement, firewood, medicinal purposes, basketry materials etc. Did you know that lime, hawthorn and beech trees all have lovely leaves for spring salads? A lot of perennial vegetables are included as they are more reliable, often more nutritious and less susceptible to slug damage.

Waiting to be planted out.

We have kept our beautiful big Scots pine and larch trees as they still have decades of life left in them. We are in the process of adding rowan, lime, beech, oak, willow, hawthorn, maple, birch and hazel trees to the woodland. A lot of these trees will be kept pollarded or coppiced and we will use the off-cuts for fuel, plant-supports and basketry. We already have some mature ash trees along the boundary.

It was love at first sight when we spotted this copper beech at the tree nursery. It had to be included in our new woodland as well as the stunning purple contorted hazel.

You will have to imagine climbers growing up and across all of these structures. Old fashioned roses, honeysuckle, ivy, virginia creeper and clematis. All of these will bring more wildlife and pollinators into our garden. As the ground is boggy, we will use the brushwood from the felled trees to build it up and some trees will be planted on raised mounds so as to save them from water logging. We will add water loving mints and wait for all of the marsh marigolds, wood angelicas, wood anemones and meadowsweets to come back. We have some beautiful native geums, which the bees just love. In Swedish they go by the name of humleblomster, which translates as bumblebee flower.

We are very much looking forward to seeing this part of our land transforming from a dark, boring plantation into a beautiful diverse habitat for us and all our visitors to enjoy. People and animals alike. We will show you the progress here over the months and years ahead.

New floors inside and out.

May 5, 2015May 5, 2015mariamayfleming

We have had a busy first few days of May, finishing off two projects. In the bathroom we finally got to the last stage of the renovations, laying the mosaic floor. We got all the tiles for the floor free from a skip outside our local tile shop. Because the walls are light and include some subtle colour we wanted the floor to be quite dark and neutral as a contrast. For the wall mosaics we used ready-mixed tile adhesive as it is easy to use for precise applications of small tiles but for the floor we opted for a heavy duty cement based floor adhesive that we mixed up ourselves. This is more economical and we believe stronger for walking on. It is important to only mix up what you can use in about 45 minutes as it starts to set after that.

Spread it on a small area and put down your bigger pieces first and adding smaller pieces where they are needed as you go. Some tiles are thinner and need a bit of adhesive added to the back as well. Use your fingers and the palm of your hand to check that all the tiles are level and you end up with a smooth, kind to bare feet floor.

Let the adhesive set for a few hours or overnight before grouting. It is important to add the grout and keep smoothing it down, pressing it into all the gaps and crevices. When you are happy with the results let it set for a couple of hours before carefully wiping it with a damp cloth. You want to remove the excess grout but be careful enough not to rub too hard and take away too much grout from the joints. If you have never grouted anything before it might be good to start in a not so visible place of the floor to get the hang of it. Let the floor grout go off and do another wipe or two to get rid of all the excess grout. After that all you need to do is polish it with a dry cloth until it shines and admire your handiwork. We are happy to have made a beautiful strong floor that should last our lifetime, for next to no money, mostly with materials aimed for landfill.

While working on the bathroom we also made good use of the few sunny spells to put down paving stones on our outdoor area in front of the house. When we moved in we planted a beautiful old hawthorn tree, which we rescued from behind our shed, in the middle of our front yard. It is an ancient custom in Sweden to plant a tree for prosperity and luck in front of your house and since half of us originate from Sweden we wanted to honour this tradition. Around the tree we wanted a circle of paving stones and we were lucky to get some cheap from a neighbour who had them left over from a project. We started off with a small recycled mosaic circle set in cement and grouted with hypertufa.

After that we dug down to slightly deeper than the paving stones height and added some sand for a smooth bed.

The paving stones went on and were tapped down with a sledgehammer but we were not too bothered to get them all even as it adds character when they are slightly uneven. We added a dry hypertufa mix of one part cement, one part compost and half a part of sand to all the cracks. It is good to tap the stones slightly so the mixtures settle in and more can be added. We then watered all of it with a fine spray to wet the mixture and wash it away from the surface of the paving stones. Later we will add a little more hypertufa mix as it has sunk down from being watered and add a mix of yoghurt, moss and sugar to get the moss growing rapidly in between all the paving stones for a natural look. The total cost for this project was about €25.

Going around in circles

April 28, 2015April 28, 2015mariamayfleming

The last month has seen some changes to our main garden circle. We have finished the work on the stone mowing strip all around the edge. Last year the grass grew into the stone wall at the front of the raised beds and it is very nice to have gotten rid of that problem. We are now also able to go around the circle with our push mower and cut the grass all the way to the edge without a problem. After the cement under the stones had set we added hypertufa to the cracks and brushed it in to set and kept watering it for four days, three times a day. This prevents the hypertufa from drying out too quickly. Hypertufa is a very versatile material to use in the garden. We make ours out of one part sand, one part cement and one part compost and a generous helping of PVA. The compost makes the dried mixture slightly porous and provides a few nutrients for mosses to grow. It can be used to create sculptures and planting troughs that look very natural after a while due to the moss.

We have also finished the second low fence to support the artichokes and cardoons. We made it out of willow and dogwood for all the woven pieces with Bamboo canes for the uprights. Hopefully it will be high enough to prevent the huge plants from blowing over. They grew to almost three meters last year.

All our plants have grown a lot this month but there is still mostly greenery to be seen and not that many flowers. April has brought a lot of sunny warm days but also some frost and even hailstones.Our weeping birch has beautiful small leaves and the onion sets we planted in March are all growing nicely.The tree peony is about to flower and a lot of annual poppies have germinated from self sown seed last year. It is great to have some self seeding plants such as poppies, forget me not and aquilegias in the flower borders as you are always in for a surprise. We are keeping our dandelions all around the garden and do not try to eradicate them from the lawn as they are very important to the bee population and also nice to eat in salads.

Here you can see pictures of the circle towards the four points of the compass.

East

South

West

North

We are taking the same pictures once a month to keep a record of the changes throughout the seasons and the years. All the posts containing these photos are collected in the category Elemental circle. As we are nearing the end of the month we are looking forward to the colorful floral explosion that is bound to happen in May. All over the garden there are thousands of buds, just about ready to burst open. We can’t wait to share next months pictures of our circle with you.

Light at the end of the bottles.

April 26, 2015mariamayfleming

We have been hard at work for over a month and finally we are starting to see the results of our efforts. One of the main reasons for our bathroom renovation was to raise the ceiling. It was so low that an adult was unable to stand up in the bath to take a shower. It always had a slightly claustrophobic feel to it. So the old leaking, low roof had to go.

Along with a raised ceiling we wanted more light and our choice fell on a wall made out of old wine bottles and jars. Recycled glass is an environmentally friendly, free, beautiful resource. It is easy to come by and easy to use. What is not to like about it. We drank the odd bottle of wine, collected bottles from friends and ate a lot of pasta sauce and mayonnaise for a while. The walls in our bathroom are very thick so we only needed to pop a jar on top of each bottle and tape to secure. It is good to have a similar height to your glass bottle bricks as it makes the building a lot easier. You will need to play around with the different bottles and jars to get them to an equal height. Make sure all bottles are clean and dry before taping them together.

After removing all the layers of the old ceiling and roof, we built up next to the window and on each corner with cement blocks that could easily take the weight of the new roof and filled in the sections in between with our made up bottle- bricks.

To save on cement we put insulation on the middle of the block in the same way we did on our bottle wall in our extension. You can read about all our construction techniques in the building category. The bottle bricks acts as double glazing in themselves so makes for a very well insulated wall.

We filled in between the bottles with cement and smoothed it out on the inside and out. After that all that we needed to do was put on a 50/50 mix of PVA and emulsion for two layers followed by two layers of emulsion. We went for white and added some sand to the paint in the ceiling to get a similar look to the bottle sections and the ceiling. We added mosaics to the pillars and are very happy with the results. The result is a bright, personal and very cheap bathroom. About 80% of our tiles came from a skip so the main cost for our walls was for the few concrete blocks, cement, the tile adhesive and grout. But the best feeling comes from knowing we have impacted as little as possible on the environment by using mainly bottles and other recycled materials. It takes more time than tiling and building in a conventional way, but if you decide to do something similar, we think you will be very happy with the results. Please post pictures in the comments if you make something inspired by this post. We would love to see it.

Wonderful distractions in spring

April 17, 2015April 17, 2015mariamayfleming

We are hard at work putting the finishing touches to our complete bathroom renovation. We will soon write a couple of posts here about it so you can see our new mosaics, our living roof and bottle walls. Maybe it was unwise to choose to do this renovation at this time of year as the garden is a constant distraction. It is not easy to toil away for hours attaching tiny tiles to a design or smoothing cement around the bottles in the wall when all the joys of spring are right on our doorstep. When we tore ourselves away from the work for a few precious moments today we managed to spot the first peacock butterfly, the first swallow and the first newt of the year as well as all the beautiful colours, shapes and wonders in the following images. We are happy to be at the finishing stages of our renovations as we will be able to spend some more time in the garden soon, where even weeding is a happy task at this time of year.

Katsura tree

Irish primrose Claddagh

Japanese acer orange dream

Larch

Pieris forest flame

Amelanchier Canadensis

Pulmonaria Lungwort

Bog garden

Purple sprouting broccoli

Pear blossom

Berries to be

For the love of Rhubarb

April 10, 2015April 10, 2015mariamayfleming

What plant is more beautiful and versatile than rhubarb? We grow five different varieties in our garden. One of the firsts plants in spring to make an appearance and also one of the first to harvest. We grow several traditional garden rhubarb for eating as well as two varieties often described as ornamental, although they have great medicinal and culinary values as well.

Rheum Palmatum, sometimes called Chinese or Turkish rhubarb have been used for millennia to treat a range of conditions and health problems. The name derives from the shape of the leaves, rather like a hand with fingers outstretched. The root is the most powerful part of this plant. The leaves, as all rhubarb leaves are poisonous. Our Palmatums are two years old now and are really starting to settle in. The leaves can grow very big, close to a metre across and the whole plant can grow to around three meters. It is very ornamental and looks great close to our wildlife pond. We put it into slightly boggy ground and built a small mound for each plant and they seem to like those conditions very much. Every year we put on well rotted manure and some straw for mulch. All rhubarbs also benefit from having their cut-off leaves put down around the plant as mulch that slowly rots and nourishes and protects the crown. When we planned our garden we wanted to put in some Gunnera but as one variety of this is liking Irish conditions a bit too well and has become a problem and is very difficult to eradicate, we did not want to risk planting any varieties of this beautiful plant. We did a bit of research and read about Rheum Palmatum and now we could not be happier with our choice. It is a magnificent plant in every way, even more beautiful than the Gunnera.

Rheum Australe, Himalayan rhubarb is very pretty with rounded reddish leaves. We only planted ours last year so they are still small. We are looking forward to see how big they will get this year.

Our eating rhubarbs are Timperly early, Victoria and a lovely unknown variety we were given by a friend. We like using our rhubarb for pies, cordials, chutneys and simply stewed. When harvesting it is important to pull the stems and twist slightly as cutting the stems with a knife leaves a stump that can rot and damage the crown. We love using other flavours to enhance the rhubarb. For pies and cordials try strawberries as combined with the rhubarb it is simply delicious. The cordial, especially turns out lovely like this and is a good alternative to most shop-bought versions, full of additives and artificial sweeteners. For stewing, jam and chutney try grated fresh ginger for a nice zing. Vanilla and almond also work well. Try making a sponge cake with vanilla and scatter it with chopped rhubarb and slivered almonds before baking.

Other good uses for rhubarb are as shady hiding places for all our frogs and toads and for making leaf concrete casts. We will give it a go in the summer when the leaves are nice and big. Rhubarb is such a beautiful and useful plant. We think every garden should have at least one.

As plants and slugs emerge.

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015mariamayfleming

Our garden plants are slowly waking up after the long winter and unfortunately, so are the slugs. We do not wish to use any chemicals in our garden and as every gardener knows this can be a challenge when it comes to dealing with slugs. We have created two wildlife ponds and now we have a lot of frogs and newts in the garden and they thankfully eat a lot of slugs.

Another strategy we have found very satisfying are putting out thin slices of slightly overripe melon around the garden. The slugs cannot resist this and gladly abandon our small seedlings to feast on the melon. We then come along with a scissors and cut them in half. This might seem cruel but at least the slugs die instantly and do not suffer as they would if slug-pellets or salt were used on them. We have a huge number of slugs in the garden, and last spring we cut between 300 to 700 slugs every night and if we had not done that we would have had very few flowers and vegetables left. As our wildlife population has increased a lot over the year we hope it will be a better balance in the garden this year with more slug predators present.

Our Ligularias seem to be a firm favourite and last year they did not grow very well due to massive slug damage in the spring. We have done some research over winter and have now come up with a very satisfying solution to this problem. We use a combination of sheep’s wool and crushed eggshells. The sheep’s wool we use straight from the sheep and it has not been washed. We save all our eggshells in a dish on the kitchen counter. When it is full we roast them in the oven until they start to smell a bit burnt. We then crush them up finely and keep them in a big bucket in the shed. Last year we used them around plants but the results were disappointing and a lot of slugs seemed to get across them. But this year we are very happy with the results. The combination of fluffed up sheep’s wool weighted down by a layer of eggshells has now been applied for a few weeks and the plants have suffered no damage at all in this period. As a bonus the wool will rot down over the year and fertilise the plant. We are planning to use this on our Hostas as well as any other plant that might come under attack. It is a very cheap and wildlife friendly way to deal with the slugs.

Spring is truly on its way here in the West of Ireland and we would like to share a few pictures here of our signs of spring along with a very welcome guest…

Forsythia

Cherry blossom

Hellebore

Daffodils

Purple sprouting broccoli

And last but not least, our first bumblebee of the year.

Set in stone.

March 23, 2015March 23, 2015mariamayfleming

Most of our garden is planted with edible plants. But when we planned it out on paper we also wanted to include a lot of flowers. Some of them are herbs with culinary and medicinal purposes and some are magnets for bees and butterflies. We wanted to arrange our flowering plants in a pretty way and also wanted a flat area for friends, kids and relatives to pitch a tent when visiting. We do not like square shapes, straight paths and formal gardens very much. Because of this we choose a design based on circles. Circles have been used for thousands of years in cultures all over the world. We like ancient stone circles very much and decided early on to have a large circle in the centre of our garden and add four standing stones, one for each point of the compass. The first job was to get rid of the stones in the ground in order to have a smooth area for pitching tents and have a bit of a lawn as the rest of the garden is more on the wild side. We did not know just how many stones there were in our 9 meters across circle. We built crescent moon shaped raised beds all around the circle and still ended up with huge piles of stones for other projects. We then had to hire a rotivator to get the area somewhat flat and ready for seeding. All those preparations were done last year. This past weekend we had beautiful weather and decided it was time to put our standing stones in place and start making an edge in natural stone to make the circle easier to mow with our push mower and have less weeds growing into the raised beds. The stones needed to be moved from another part of the garden and we made a sledge for this purpose. We then used the ancient method of rollers to move the standing stones across the garden. It was fun and quite easy.

We dug holes and planted the stones firmly in place at the cardinal points. We dug out a shallow ditch all around the circle and filled it with gravel. Then it was time to mix up some cement and put down the small flagstones for the mowing strip. At each standing stone we added a few more stones.

East is connected to the element of air and the colour yellow so in this section we planted a Japanese maple with yellow leaves and a lot of grasses that can move in the wind. South is connected to the element of Fire and the colour red so we have a lot of red flowers here and a lovely Japanese maple with bright red leaves. In the West we added a lot of seashells for the element water and a blue flowering Ceanothus. We still have to do the North stone decorations which will consist of a lot of crystals for the element of Earth and bright green plants.

East

South

West

Here you can see the view across the circle to the East, South, West and North. We are planning to take the same pictures once a month so you can see how the garden changes in the course of the months and years ahead. All of these posts will be in the category called Elemental circle.