plan of attack

The leaves are falling off the trees.  Which made me think I had better clear the leaf bin ready to put them in.  We operate on a two year cycle for making leaf compost, with newly collected leaves going into the bigger bin, after last year's leaves have been forked out of that into the smaller bin, after that's been emptied and the two year old leaves spread on the garden.  The bins are made of chicken wire stapled to fence posts.  By the end of year one a pile of leaves pushing a metre tall has sunk to about a quarter of its original depth, and over the next year it sinks by about another half again.

And so I spent today working at the bottom of the back garden, weeding, stone-picking and trimming edges, and spreading leaf mould.  The stones aren't really doing any harm where they are, but I collect them because I want them for the path by the dustbins.  I got another litre today, and that was without any digging, just collecting ones that had come to the surface.  The need to empty the leaf bin seemed a fairly roundabout way of deciding where to work, but the birch bed was as good a place as any, and quite nicely sheltered from the tail end of hurricane Ophelia.

I made a work plan for the autumn and winter, which I may discard if it becomes oppressive.  Every area of the garden has a name, not to be cute but so that when I keep planting records I have a consistent method of describing where I mean.  Studying at Writtle I discovered that this is mainstream landscape management practice, but I think most gardeners do something similar.  All I did was write down on a spreadsheet the name of each area that needs work, in an order roughly working away from the house.  No narrative or description of the work needed, as I know what that is.  As each area is tackled it will be deleted from the list.  If an area is substantially sorted out but with tasks outstanding I'll move it to the bottom of the list.  As the months progress the list should become shorter, and at least some of the tasks on it should be simpler and more discrete than at present.

The snag with the list is that it has 50 items on it (excluding painting the hall, which will do for when we get a couple of rainy days), and that's after I was able to delete 'front of the house', because I tidied that yesterday, and planted up the ancestral pot with some poor little violas that had been sitting around for about three weeks, and scrubbed the worst of the dirt and lichen off another pot.  'Front of the house' was a small and not too wildly messy area, and some of the others are much larger and require much more work.  I don't think there is any chance at all of getting everything done before the end of February, which is why the list may become oppressive, and I may suddenly scrub the entire spreadsheet.  But it is good to have something to aim at, and be able to tick at least some entries off.  I've nearly finished the birch bed I was working on today.  One more barrow load of leafmould would have done it, but by then I was required to keep an eye on the chickens while the Systems Administrator got on with supper.  The 'formal pond' will be done once I've taken the debris to the dump and had another go at fishing out the duckweed.  The 'herb bed' is half done, and the 'Italian garden' probably 90% done, though I need a calm day to glyphosate the gaps in the paving.  And I've made a respectable start at 'below the rose bank'.  It wasn't on the list, but I remembered to bring in the holey stone, before the first frost.

The ground is horribly dry.  The rain we had in July and August never made up for the very dry spring, and many plants are looking miserable and stressed.  There was a tiny bit of rain this morning, not enough to do any good at all, and just enough to put a slick of moisture on leaves and lawns, and the bits of the house that the S.A. finished sanding off yesterday and was ready to paint.  Now the strong wind is making it even worse for plants.  I'm normally a fan of the winter skeleton look (which is very much a matter of personal taste.  One of my colleagues just finds it messy and detests it) but this year anything herbaceous that has finished flowering and is looking in the least bit tired is being chopped right down at the first opportunity.  With a work list 50 items long I'm not in the mood to mess about.