14.10. Log-rolls arrival

The whiff of summer we had two weeks ago is well and truly gone and the autumn has arrived. It has been a nice warm day today, but it gets really chilly in the late afternoon and working in the garden at this time of the year means layers of clothes and half mittens for me.

I thought I would start today’s post with some photos from my front garden, perhaps you remember I decided not to plant anything in the window boxes this spring and summer, and go straight to the winter plants in September. Because of all the nice warm weather we have had, the plants have grown quite a lot these 4 weeks, and most of them are already flowering. The boxes are filled with pansies and pinks (Dianthus) in a mix of colours. The pansies will flower throughout the winter and till late spring, the pinks should do the same, but it really depends on what kind of winter we get; too many frost nights could kill them off.

Here are the window boxes on the wall, close-up, and the blue and white pansies are lovely against the different shade of pink and white pinks. I had pansies here last winter too, and even with frost for several weeks, which made the window boxes freeze solid, the pansies survived and continued to flower – a truly perfect plant for winter display! They are not too fuzzy about water either, even if the boxes dry out completely they just hang their head a bit as to say ‘come and water me, please’ and after being watered they spring back to their usual self. 

Close-up of one of the window boxes, with one of the darkest pinks in full flower.















Here are some close ups of the pinks in the window boxes, they look really pretty, don’t they? I do hope the pinks will survive the winter, it would be great to be able to keep this display until May next year, when  I can plant the summer plants again.

Let’s take a trip round the house, to my back garden. My roses are still going strong, despite being middle of October. They actually flower all year round, except for the short period after I cut all the rose bushes down, usually in late February or early March. After the spring pruning it takes 4-6 weeks before the roses have grown tall enough to start flowering again, so that’s a period without any roses in my garden, but it is necessary to cut down roses every year or else the bushes would become very leggy and too tall. At this time of year the roses flowers a bit sparser than in the spring, but all 7 rose bushes are flowering at the moment, just not as prolific.

And this is what my garden looks like at the moment…I have continued the work with removing the grass and the concrete path, and this bottom end have been watered several times so that it will be easier to dig the trench for the log-roll border that I am putting in next. The path on the right side is going to continue down to the bottom end of the garden and then turn left and end up in front of the lilies. I need easy access to all the lilies so I can manage to do my daily patrol for lily beetles, although I am trying out a new pesticide against lily beetles next year, an organic liquid that I already am using on the roses against greenfly. I have read that it can be effective against lily beetles too, and if that is true it would be amazing. I won’t really believe it until I see it, but apparently, the company that produce this stuff, uses this product on thousands of lilies every year with great results, so hopefully it will work in my garden too. That will save me a lot of work :-)

And here is what I am doing tomorrow! This is the log-rolls for the new path I am making and here is how they come from the manufacturer; pressure treated for long lasting but not stained, so tomorrow I am staining 10.8 metres of log-rolls, on both sides and ends, two coats. OK, maybe it won’t all be done tomorrow, but this job is like all jobs I do; it takes as long as it takes, no deadline and no pressure, I go out and start working when I feel like it, and I stop and go inside when I have had enough. There’s always a day tomorrow…or another day. Fortunately we are not supposed to have any rain until the middle of next week, so I hope to be finished with the log-rolls by then :-)

That’s it for tonight, my fish and chips are in the oven and I am going to have an evening in front of the telly. See you next time, take care.