Garden Centre

Thursday, October 8, 2009

After the rain

The nerines have held up, as they nearly always do – in fact they prefer cold and wet to warm and dry, and the Pyracantha looks great, but most of the rest of the garden is looking very much the worse for wear.

The pond is literally brimming over – the water is right at the lip of the liner and the marginal plants are not so much marginal as sub-aqua, right now! If the water doesn’t drop a little by Sunday I shall have to do some bailing out, because otherwise too much of the soil nutrients will be washed into the water and that’s bad for the fish as well as the insects that live at the pond bottom.

An awful lot of leaves from the apple tree have ended up in the water too, and I’ve been fishing them out (ineptly) with the fish net whenever I walk past the pond, or they will rot down and add to the debris at the bottom of the pond. I can’t help wishing that we didn’t have such a big, deep, ugly pond – why on earth did the previous owners of our house decide to have a pond that’s nine feet long and six feet deep? And why did they pile all the earth up behind it to make a monumental mound like a buried VW Beetle? And why didn’t I get ruthless with it when we moved in 11 years ago?

As it is, the bamboo that are planted on the mound are loving the rain and their position and are now trying to block out the sun, so as soon as its dry enough I shall have to go out and cut them down to ground level too. At least they make great pea sticks for next year.

Labels: garden bamboo, garden rain, nerines, pyracantha

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:24 AM

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