Planting my new olive tree

I shared the start and end of this in my August garden update, but as you’d imagine there was a bit more to it than just filling the pot and popping in the plant.

We’d seen the pot when we were at Grand Designs back in May. We weren’t looking for a pot, but there was something about it, as well as the show price and free delivery, that had us hooked. I always knew that if we bought the new large pot, then it would be going on the far corner of our patio and I just needed to convince MOH it would look fine there.

Pot delivered, now for the tree

When it arrived and we’d stripped its wrapping off, the first thing we did was to see it in situ. Thankfully it worked just as well as I hoped it was, and MOH was convinced. The second thing we did was carry the pot back to the garage where it stayed for a while, while we sourced the right sized, right shaped and as importantly right priced olive tree.

I didn’t want something so small it was lost in the pot, but equally I didn’t want something that was too large - a real goldilocks tale! So we had a tour of a few garden centres near us to check out the olive trees, and they had a lot. Again we hadn’t intended to buy one straight away as we knew we were going to some garden shows, and well, there’s always a deal to be done at a garden show isn’t there?

But we found the right sized tree for the right price at the second garden centre we visited. And £32 later and yet more convincing MOH it would work we were back home with our new tree. Which of course we left in its garden centre pot for a good couple of months…

Sourcing the soil

It’s a large pot to fill, and just as I’m running out of pots I also don’t have much spare soil in this garden. I didn’t want to use all new compost as I wanted the pot to have even just the smallest part of our local eco-system. I asked in our village Facebook group if anyone had any soil they wanted to get rid of, but no joy.

I knew I’d need to add drainage to the pot, and plenty of it but I didn’t want to add rocks and weight to the pot. I’ve used polystyrene seed trays before in pots, so I thought using larger blocks would work here. I was kicking myself though as we hadn’t that long ago had a purge of the polystyrene that we had, but never mind. So I also asked in the group if anyone had any of those chunky polystyrene blocks, but I didn’t get much joy from that request either.

However while out walking around the villages lanes I did find a large chunk of polystyrene blowing along so I brought that home and stored that for a while. In the end though over the summer we had some more deliveries which included enough hefty chunks of polystyrene that we could use.

But we were no further forward on the soil.

Or not much anyway. With my tomatoes finishing relatively early this year I had two pots of soil that I was sure would have a relatively active eco-system, and so they were earmarked for the big pot - but I would need more.

In the end we bought some compost for trees and large shrubs and some bags of topsoil, and used a mixture of these along with the tomato pot soil and a very large helping of horticultural grit, again to help drainage. It makes sense that olive trees don’t like soggy roots doesn’t it, when you think about the countries they grow.

Actually planting the thing!

There might have been more than one or two suggestions from MOH about when the thing would actually get planted, and get that large pot out of the garage. So with a morning free and time to potter about, it was time.

But before anything went in the pot I wanted to get some pot feet stuck on the bottom. I’ve used these round silicone feet (from Amazon) wedged under our other pots and they’ve done well. As this pot won’t be moved that often, and will be heavy, I didn’t want to have to faff about getting the pot feet in the right place if we do move it. I used PVA glue to stick these in place, and before long we were good to turn the pot the right way up.

I had help adding the polystyrene blocks for drainage - we found sawing them into smaller chunks was the most efficient way to break them down.

And then before any soil was added, it was time for a quick position check.

Yeap, all good so in went the soil from the tomato pots, two bags of tree/shrub compost and a bag of horticultural grit, which I forked through the soil using my original ‘ladies’ gardening fork. This was my first (and only as it’s still going strong) garden fork from Homebase, which I bought along with a small spade when I got my first house (and garden) back in 1992.

After firming the soil down, I gave the pot a good water and left the soil to settle for a day or too. it didn’t change the level much at all, but that itself was good to know.

It really was finally time

While giving the olive tree a good soak in a trug of water, we added a couple of bags of topsoil and more horticultural grit to the large pot, making an hole for the tree in its centre by standing the olive tree in its pot, in the new pot at the level we wanted to plant it. I’ve seen this done before by Monty Don and co, but have never really done it myself.

It worked well, as removing the potted olive tree left the right sized hole. So all that was left to do was to get the olive tree out of its pot, and pot it in the ready made hole.

And then, after checking it was straight enough from all angles and adding some decorative grit on the top to deter weeds, we could sit back and admire our new olive tree in the large pot.

I think it works well. And with a couple of olives on it already this month, I think it’s happy in its new home too.

We’ll need to give it some protection over winter, but I have some garden fleece in the garage I can use for that. I’ll probably also add some bubble wrap to the pot, as while it’s frost proof, olives don’t like their roots frozen which is fair enough really, I wouldn’t either.

Caring for olive trees in pots

I’ve found the following pages useful, and if you’re thinking about adding an olive tree to your garden, or if you have one already, then you may too:

• How to Grow Olive Trees, BBC Gardeners’ World

• How to grow Olives, RHS

• Trees: Growing in Containers, RHS

• Olive tree care sheet, The Norfolk Olive Tree Company

• Feeding Olive trees, Plantura Magazine

• Pruning your Olive Tree, The Norfolk Olive Tree Company.

I’ve yet to get some seaweed feed for my olive, but it’s on my list for my next visit to the garden centre. I’m loving this new addition to our patio, and along with the garden sofa and the pots I’ve started to place around the garden it’s really feeling like we’re starting to ‘own’ our garden.

I’m sure there’s much more to come though, but that’s all for another day.

Half the Scraps

I’ve made another quilt as part of my quilting ‘stretch’ project using the block from Sherri at A Quilting Life’s mystery block a month. As I said then I don’t know if I’ll manage to make a quilt a month, but I won’t really know unless I try…

What I’ve learnt generally from this ‘stretch’ project is that while I’m using lots of fabric from my stash, I’ve also got a fair bit which remains from these projects which is already cut to the widths I’m generally using. So my plan for this quilt was to use up ‘all the scraps’ and to be ok with random fabric and pattern piecing.

My ninth charity quilt

So while my plan was to use ‘all the scraps’ in reality that didn’t work - not only was there more than I could use in my latest four block quilt, some of the colours jarred. So hence this quilt’s name of Half the Scraps!

I’m sure you’ll recognise at least some of the fabrics I settled on - in fact, they’ve all been used in previous quilts. Some as recently as last month, and at least one from way back at the start of the year.

The block itself was a churn dash, which I wasn’t sure about at all when I first saw it. I’ve not sewn one before, but actually now with five under my belt I can see the attraction.

Making the test blocks helps me understand how they go together, but also it helps show which colour placements are most successful, or which I like the most in any case. And this month it was the lower right block that worked best for me with it’s darker triangular corners, so that’s something I noted for my own Mystery Block quilt - come back tomorrow to see how that one went!

Adding the borders

As my aim was to use up the material strips I had left from earlier quilts, my plan was to embrace random log cabin borders - but within reason. I decided to still split the fabrics into two groups and try to keep them in the same half of the borders. I managed it pretty well for the green and peach striped fabric (an old summer shirt of MOH’s), but with less of some of the other patterns it was definitely more random.

I needed to twirl some of the blocks around to get a layout that worked for my eye, and so that the dominant pink ‘patchwork’ material (an old duvet cover) was more evenly spread.

But still I felt it wasn’t quite right.

I had no idea what colour final border to add. But then I remembered I was doing random, and so the final border could also comprise more than one fabric. And that helped a lot. On the pinker edges I used a paler fabric, and on the paler edges I used a new multicoloured pink fabric which came from mum’s stash.

It’s also the fabric that I’ve used on the reverse of the quilt, so it fits in with this month’s ethos of using what I had cut. More so actually as the strips leftover from the backing piece haven ‘t even made it into the scrap stash pile!

Now that it’s finished I’m much happier with it, but during its construction I was less sure. I also tried a different way of quilting this one - and well, I learnt why most quilts aren’t quilted in circles! It’s hard and the material on the back wants to pucker up more than normal. It’s not something I’ll be trying again for a long while, that’s for sure!

You can see my other quilts which I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets, including those that are part of this ‘stretch’ project in earlier posts. I’m aiming to publish an update on my progress in the last week of each month for the remainder of 2025.

My garden in August

Last month there was plenty of blooms and gardening activity, this month less of that but more of moving pots about and some changes to our garden furniture too. But first, let me share the flowering succulent in all its glory…

It’s great isn’t it? But that’s not all - look at how blue the flowering globe thistles got. Hopefully there’ll be plenty more flowers on this one next year.

August was also the month I finally tackled the new pot and the new olive tree. It’s a big pot, and the olive tree isn’t so big - I mean, it will grow, slowly and will eventually adapt to its new home. It was very reasonably priced at £32 - we looked at many olive trees, and many had much higher price tags.

I was keen to get the pot feet stuck on the pot before we started to put anything inside it. These silicone pot feet are great, but even with fairly big pots they do move a bit, and I didn’t want that to happen with this one, so out came the glue. The other thing I was keen to do before we filled the pot was to check it’s position was right.

And check things like, could MOH cut and edge the grass without moving the pot; what did it look like from inside the house, and obviously from the patio, as well as other key points in the garden. We got there, slower than MOH would like, but this pot is going to be heavy when it’s full and we aren’t going to be moving it much!

I’ll share another post on planting up the olive tree - but we took a couple of days to fill the pot too, as I was keen to see if the levels changed as the compost settled in. It didn’t really, but we didn’t know that.

There’s been a few new additions to the garden this month, including these vintage metal storage boxes which we picked up from the Rutland Flower Show. Even MOH liked them, which is something - slowly I’m winning him over to the mix of new and vintage items! The plan is for these to provide functional but attractive storage in the greenhouse, yes the one I don’t yet have!

I also picked up these Victorian terracotta pots at the Rutland Flower Show. These are bigger than the small flower pot type ones I already have, but not as big as those I use elsewhere in the garden, so size-wise they’re a good addition to my stock. They don’t necessarily help solve my pot crisis, but as they say every little helps.

This month we also said goodbye to our much loved and much used in London but not here sun loungers. They’ve had a good life with us, and we’ve enjoyed having them in our lives but it was time to let them go via the local Facebook group to another family who will I’m sure enjoy them too.

We realised that we were unlikely to use them in this garden, and that they also took up more space than we wanted to allocate them in the garage. Their departure was helped by the fact I saw the garden furniture I swooned over at Grand Designs Live back in May in the sale, and reduced by a third. So that was promptly ordered, and has since arrived - and I suspect that may have contributed a little to the change in weather we’ve seen at the start of September, so sorry about that!

Elsewhere in the garden the little crab apple tree remains laden with apples - it looks so weighed down, that I imagine it will be pleased to shed its load when the apples are picked. I’m debating when the best time to pick them is, but I feel it could be imminent as I’ve seen a recipe for crab apple and chilli jelly which sounds right up my street.

The sweet pepper plant - another purchase from the Rutland Flower Show, a bargain at £5 - is producing more peppers and ripening those it already has. We’ve picked six now, and eaten most of them already. I’m hoping that there’ll still be time for the smaller ones to grow and ripen before the weather changes for good.

You’ll have seen in my This August update that our new kitchen sofa arrived, which meant it was time for the garden sofa which we’ve used in the conservatory in our old house and in the kitchen here, to move into the garden. And it’s been a very welcome addition, as it offers a much more relaxed seating option.

Though it did need more than just moving to the garden. MOH rightly pointed out that initially it looked as if we’d just dumped it there before moving it to the tip, which clearly isn’t the case. When the cushions are out, it’s fine, it looks like it belongs but without them, he did have a point.

So cue some softening with plants - the astrantia and santolini one end, and my Gertrude Jekyll rose the other. It works I think, and has helped ground the sofa and make it look as if it really belongs.

Moving those pots led onto moving more pots. We’ve not really been able to enjoy our plants so much this year as they suffered early on and were in the relative shelter of our heat pump trellis. That changed though with this group of cottage garden type plants moving to the end of the garden close to the crab apple tree.

And with this group of plants moving alongside the back wall. I wanted to try them out in parts of the garden where I think they will end up growing, admittedly not in this exact formation or as close together, but for now as groups of pots. I haven’t moved them yet, so so far the master plan in my head hasn’t failed me.

For this post though, I’ll leave you with two views from inside - both from the same window - of the Gertrude Jekyll rose, and the newly planted olive tree.

It really feels like things are starting to come together, and that we’re starting to claim and make the garden our own.