Friday 29 January 2016

Sorting out the Gravel Garden and Agave Pottatorum


Tuesday I made a start on this area of my garden , After a year and a half of me  being very poorly , the Pittasporums had grown too tall and spindly , they need to be forced to bush out at the bottom more . There are evil brambles clambering through its branches and it is awkward to get in to ..I have to climb in through the branches of my beautiful Acer " Bloodgood ". There is a pretty young  Corkscrew Hazel  and a lovely shrub that has bright yellow pea shaped flowers ..it usually responds well to being hard pruned after flowering....I may have cut it back too hard ..since I accidently cut off the one lower branch that I had meant to keep .
 Next job .....Agave Pottatorum..that I grew 15 years ago on my bedroom windowsill , the seed that I got from the British Cactus Society .
  This year it put up a splendid flower spire , to the delight of local honeybees and butterflies ....and me : )
  I watched as the flowers developed seed pods and then one by one they fell off . Some of these I saved  to try and dry out and grow..the rest fell to the ground and mysteriously disappeared  .
 Now here's the thing ....people keep asking me " Will the mother plant die now that it has flowered ? " " Could it be saved ? " "What if you cut off the flower spire , maybe it would have enough energy to survive ? "
                                                    So , I thought , lets see !



                  I had to use the biggest loppers in my husbands tool shed !


                                            Scrunch .......and down it came !


 So with more horrible weather coming , I decided that I must get the Agaves covered
over...they are o.k with the cold ..but dont like too much wet .
                                             

I have slabs of stone all around and tucked under the Agaves leaves which direct the rain water away from the centre  to keep those roots dry as possible .


I bought this umbrella cloche many years ago, no idea which make it is . I never managed to put it together correctly but used it in its semi put together state anyway . It is forecast to be very windy,  so I have weighed it down with some of the Pittasporum branches .
 There is another Agave behind it , this one is Agave Americana which is the the most commonly seen one, it is the hardiest one of all the Agaves here in Cornwall England .
I know if you happen to be reading this in somewhere like Mexico , then I,m sure you'll be laughing at all this  !


 I found a baby Agave Pottatorum some distance away from the mother plant in the surrounding gravel ....now rescued and taken away to be potted up .
I called it a day after all that . It was getting too dark for me to see what I had achieved even !


Wednesday I left it as I had other things to do and Belly Dance Class in the evening  .

Thursday , I got up at 5.30 am and did the washing and hung it all out and got straight back to lopping the Pittasporums , which smells like lemons and has wood like iron ...cutting spiteful  brambles and pulling out the Ivy which is taking over the gravel area .


With my two best friends  watching and following me , I weeded ,weeded , weeded !


I finished off with some more weeding and pruning the red stems of Cornus alba Siberica
those red stems are now sitting in a deep bowl of water , where they will put out roots ready to be planted out somewhere else in the garden or share  .
 Friday --went shopping in Falmouth with my friend  , exploring all the lovely little shops we'd never been in before ....had delicious fish and chips in The Harbour Lights Fish + Chips Restaurant .... we always used to take our children in there when they were small...it was always so child friendly. So it brought back happy memories  , lovely views across the harbour too .
 So housework , gardening , dancing , shopping ,eating well and talking ....I should sleep well tonight !
                        More wind and rain coming  .......yawn  ! Goodnight !


3 comments:

  1. Wow, you have been busy, but when did you find the weather to do it all in? The only decent day we have had here was Thursday, and the lawn got its first cut!

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    1. Thursday was fairly dry and the rest of the week has only been slightly mizzly by day .We had some proper rain last night , which means the rest of those weeds should pull up easily if I can summon up enough energy to get back to it today . I might just put my feet up today ,, with my embroidery and a good book to read , after a yummy Junior Breakfast in Helston Sainsburys ! Well done for getting your lawn cut ! : )

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  2. There is nothing quite like being outside is there Daisy? On my much smaller plot there are still plants to clip, weeds to clear, and little things to find....but you really have done a lot of work there.

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