While I was distracting myself when the back breaking work of picking up leaves was taking place last weekend, I discovered the most intricate of lacy leaves in the agapanthus. Clearly it’d been there a while, and the leaf tidy up that had happened previously, clearly hadn’t been so thorough, but once it was found and managed not to disintegrate in my gardening gloved hands, it made sense to loiter just a bit more and take its picture.
Worth it wasn’t it?
…And I was hardly even missed!
In a word, my garden in November, has been all about the leaves. Lots of them. But we had some time, and relatively decent weather last weekend so our job was to tackle as many as we could and to prepare the garden for winter, although with the table wet we weren’t sure if the latter would happen.
Did I mention we had a few leaves to collect?
Yes exactly. The good news is that leaves make great leaf mulch, but after filling two black sacks it was clear we’d run out of sacks much sooner than we’d make headway with the leaves. So another plan was needed. Luckily we hadn’t got rid of all the builders bags - you know the big ones with the handles on, the ones that when they’re full are almost impossible to move? Yes, one of those, which once MOH had finished was full of leaves. Whoops. But on the plus side, it’s the first time we’ve moved one of these builders bags easily!
HELP WITH COLLECTING LEAVES?
And that was just leaves from the grass, we haven’t tackled the leaves on the beds yet. Although the yucca is lending a point or two and spearing leaves as they drop. It’s just not as quick as I’d like.
There’s leaves on the greenhouse too, and the moss has gone into overdrive too - already there’s a job for Spring! Much easier to tackle though was removing the leaves covering my succulents, which have continued to grow and spread over the summer. I’ve moved them into the greenhouse for a while as the soil was quite damp, I’ll need to remember to check on them as I don’t want them to completely dry out.
I’m sure you get the idea about the leaves. Picking leaves up is the dullest job in the world. Blowing them about the place though, that’s something entirely different and much more fun. But thankfully there were other jobs to do while leaf picking up was required, and so I busied myself covering up the agapanthus with fleece and moving pots into a more sheltered position, and freeing up some space to store the table over the winter. Cunning huh?
On the patio the white rosebush is continuing its best to flower, with a few rosebuds appearing. It’s been so mild here it’s not really surprising but it’ll be interested to see how long they last.
There’s still some colour in the garden - even with all of those leaves gone - and just as we were heading in I snapped one of my favourite garden shots. There’s just something about it that makes me smile, and manages to sum up our afternoon gardening.
Brrrr... It's a tad on the cold side right now isn't it? I know I was tempting fate by anticipating wind this weekend, but I didn't necessarily need, or want, the cold weather to accompany it. But at least it was dry. And the skies were blue. But still it was cold. My two concrete hares in the garden looked as if they were quite enjoying their blanket of leaves, but we were keen to get the leaves off of the slate.
There was also a pile of leaves gathering along the fence, and while the euphorbias (and weeds) are valiantly doing there best to grow through the leaves, I'm not sure they're doing the patio much good. That really eaten and and almost lacy set of leaves belong to a weed, with no doubt a huge tap root. I'm not sure what's eating it, but it's having a pretty good go isn't it?
My plan was to blow the leaves into orderly piles, and that generally worked, but the grass also got a bit of a blow and it gave the impression that it was clinging on for dear life. All the grass stayed in place, of course, but it was noticeably moved.
Once the leaves were in piles, they were quickly bagged and set aside to do their thing, and provide fantastic leaf mould in a year or two. Where this blower will come in handy will be retrieving leaves from our flower beds, as you can see from the photo below I've been giving the leaves fair warning!
It was still chilly though out there - the joys of having a north facing garden - even though we were wrapped up and with glimpses of sun there were only short bursts of work. We've still leaves to collect - mostly in the flowerbeds now. If the snow takes hold as the forecasters would have us believe, they might have another week's grace.
But parts of the garden are looking much less leaf covered, and smarter for it too. We know there's little chance of us capturing every single leaf in the garden, so it'll be a bit of an ongoing project. But one that's a whole lot more fun - and productive - than doing it by hand!
* This is a collaborative post, but all views and opinions are my own.
