Recycled Eco Buildings and Wildlife Friendly Food Forest Garden. Mosaics and Glass Bottle Walls.
Last year we were given some lovely Pelargonium cuttings from a friend to add to our pelargonium collection. They all spent the summer outside, but when it got too cold they had to move indoors. They have been stored all winter in some plastic crates and were looking a bit worse for wear due to poor light and cramped conditions.
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.
It is that time of year again when a lot of Willows and Dogwoods need pruning. As we like to use as many natural and local materials as possible, we decided to use the prunings to make plant-supports. Our Artichokes and Cardoons grew very big last year and some of them blew over on a windy day. So a low, strong fence to go around the bed was on our wish list. As we wanted it to last for more than one year, we used Bamboo canes as the uprights. Last year we made a few supports and used willow for the uprights, but even turned upside down, they rooted and had to be moved in the autumn. We put the uprights in quite close, about 20 centimeters apart. You need an uneven number of uprights. We then wove long straight Willow rods round and round for about 8 centimeters, left a space and wove another section higher up.
To finish off the top and make it extra strong, we used a slightly different technique, using two rods at a time and twisting them together as many times as possible between each upright. The Dogwood has very pretty colours so we used them as both a decorative and practical edge.
For our perennial flower borders we decided to use some bushier prunings of Dogwood as natural plant-supports. If they root, we will end up with a lot of new plants in the autumn, ready to give away to friends or plant elsewhere in the garden. If they don’t root they will still have served us well as supports and can go on the compost heap at the end of the season.
We also planted some evergreen spring flowering Clematis recently, that we picked up in a sale. As clematis love sun but like to have their roots in shade we made a small basket like willow structure to go around the base of each one.
One of our cats was adamant to be included in today’s photographs so here goes…
thegreenerdream 