Not a lot new in the garden this year – same old weeding, pruning, fertilising, and annuals planting for the most part. But it’s still looking not too bad!
What’s new
This year I planted Morning Glory in a pot (the pot that had tomatoes in it last year, actually) and placed it under the smoke bush with a couple of bamboo poles as a hint for where the vines were to go. This worked quite well; I was able to place it where it got morning and evening sun and gave the vines lots of scope to climb, yet in a spot where (except for the pot) there was no place to plant in the soil. There was a small problem with the weight of the vines pulling down the smoke bush branches forcing pedestrians to duck, but you can’t have everything!
The chives we planted years ago were spreading everywhere in one of the few remaining sunny spots, and as much as I liked the purple flowers, I needed space for some miniature potted roses Anna had brought home last winter. These are pretty much designed to die so you go buy more, and even putting the pot outside wasn’t going to save them, so the sunny spot called. Out with most (but not all) of the chives and in went three miniature roses. They are doing great and in fact as I’m writing this in mid-November, are still in bloom.
I was also able to solve a mystery of a volunteer plant that was growing in a window box. This plant looked like a small sturdy shrub, but I didn’t recognise it and Google lens gave improbable answers. This spring I replanted it in a bigger pot and it took off and even flowered. The blossom gave away it’s secret, it was Spirea, and in fact it had been sitting right next to Mum (or Dad – who knows!) It also had a pretty decent plant coming out of a drainage hole, as you can see here. Anyway, we needed to fill in a gap where the Choke Cherry had been, so I spent an hour or two chopping and digging at the cherry stump which had laughed at my efforts to weaken it with holes drilled into it. A freshly sharpened hand axe overcame any remaining reluctance.
In went the baby Spirea and I took the part growing out of the bottom to plant elsewhere when my neighbour asked if I really wanted to plant mint which she said would take over the garden. I had thought it was more Spirea, so that was a close call!
Rant warning
The next paragraphs are a rant about people making a mess of the Town property in front of our house. Property that I have to maintain. Feel free to skip to the photos that follow!
The only other gardening event I recall specifically was the grass in the boulevard. In spring the Town started preparing to repave our street. They began by repairing any concrete that needed work. In our case, they re-poured a total of five sections of sidewalk, and the curb across our driveway. To do this, they had to dig out the perimeter to have room for the forms. Also the excavator left tracks in the grass as it moved around (remarkably little, as it turned out) but in total there was a fair amount of damage, which they nicely repaired and re-sodded. Then to prepare the road, they lifted the heavy metal maintenance hole covers and left them on the grass for several weeks, killing the grass. At one point a Parks employee drove their ATV across the carefully filled and raked area that was awaiting sod.
However, all of this was behind us and looking fairly normal when the contractors laying fibre for internet started their process. We hit the jackpot and had a junction location installed in the boulevard in front of our house. This happened in about a dozen phases (or so it seemed) with each phase performed by a different crew. While each crew did a decent job and tidied up after them, the original grass seed and leveling was trampled on by succeeding crews who just threw down more seed, and as none of this was watered (except by me) the result is a mess with nothing level and lots of bare patches.
My sprinkler system took a beating as well. First the sidewalk excavator tore my irrigation supply line running under the sidewalk, which was probably unavoidable. In any case I was able to repair it before the concrete work and the concrete crew went to some lengths to protect my pipe when preparing the forms and doing the pour, so that worked out. Then the machines the fibre crews used all passed within inches of where I believe my irrigation pipes were buried, and as this was after the system was blown out for winter, I will not know if they were damaged until I turn on the system in spring. At least three people on the fibre crews made a show of taking a note of our address and promised to leave a card in my mailbox as a contact point, and none did. So I have to wait and see – whether the sprinklers will work and whether anyone will fix them!
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