an earthworm of one's own

Brought back a bucket full of leafmould from my parents' garden, heaving with worms and deposited them on the hard dry soil of Dog Kennel Hill. The leafmould pile is about 10ft square and I have been helping out with ferrying it across the garden to be dug in prior to veg planting. Its like worm spaghetti. So, I indentured them to make my patch more diggable!

iron council

Ok it is not mild. Really not mild. I can see bulbs popping through and plants I want to divide but its too damn cold. I have however bribed a friend into helping me plant/weed some of my patches (little does she know) in exchange for seeds and plants.

I stopped by the Dog Kennel Hill patch yesterday and saw that the council have done their random dig. I suppose its ok, most of my stuff is still there...Brave Aquilegia making it through... and the large and more identifiable clumps of Escholzia [sp?] aka California Poppies are there though some small casualities have been 'thinned out'... There is a Yucca in trouble however, if anyone who actually reads this has a stake it would be great if you could forcefully prop it up otherwise someone is going to remove it (the plant is horizontal and poking out into the road).

camberwell grove, even

...and today  I also spied that the ground by the railway underpass/weak bridge in the middle of 'the grove' is wet enough to dig... and I have a spare sarcococca just waiting to be re-homed...

...and this today I re-homed it in that very place, testing out how crap the soil is [which is quite crap - its only the rain that has made it at all diggable, but sarcococca can cope with dry shade just fine] and also adding in 2 hollyhocks from the forest on dog kennel hill. I also did a bit more weeding and trimming up that hill and found that there are indeed hollyhocks sprouting the whole way up amongst the weeds...I tried to make it more obvious that they are there so hopefully no council workers will weed them out.

...and previously on camberwell grove I realised that there was a new-ish small tree-pit with bare soil not concreted over, so I added in euphorbia, an aquilegia and lychnis. Its opposite The Vineyard.

Beating the Weeds

Its 2013, I finished my book, its ridiculously mild, still, though not actually raining again. So, I went to the Dog Kennel Hill patch with gloves, recyclying bag and plants. I added in 3 x bronze fennel, 1 x euphorbia robbiae, 1 x euphorbia wulfenii and a hardy geranium - and did two whole sacks of weeding... J had to stop by and bring the second sack along with a second set of gloves because the first set got sopping wet. Mainly I pulled out the stuff I thought was couch grass but is probably trefoil, groundsel and sodden leaves. The whole patch is looking really healthy in spite of the carpet of weeds. The Euphorbias are all doing really well. With all the rain the Acanthus is finally bedding in to the otherwise hard soil. The California Poppies seeded widely so they will look extra great this year. I am rather amazed that the Lychnis does not seem to have seeded even though it does so willy-nilly in my parents' garden which is why I have some to guerrilla garden. The Hollyhocks remain alarmingly prolific. At some point I want to transplant a lot more of them up the hill and perhaps in St Giles Churchyard gardens.

I did check in to make sure the plants I added to St Giles were still doing ok and yes indeed, 2 Arum Lillies and an Acanthus.

Mucking in

Also... thanks to Helena of Grove Park for some compost! She is spearheading an ambitious plan to guerrilla garden ALL of the tree pits in Grove Park and has kindly donated some compost for my guerrilla works in exchange for some ready to go Michaelmas daisies (and there will be some white daisies, Leucanthemum, and maybe some hardy Geraniums ready in a few weeks too).

Friends of Borage

Sunday morning; figured [correctly] that not many people would be about Camberwell Green... So I had a thought that the difficult-due-to volume-of-litter patch next to the Job Centre could be the place for the plant I call Friend of Borage. Its a very tough, not to say chronically invasive, perennial that looks fairly like Borage but with white flowers that bees love. Every little bit of any root will grow. Our garden was about 50% FoB when we moved in [now down to about 15%]. On clearing up the bottles, cigarette packets and coffee cups up popped a Southwark council cleaner with brilliant timing. We moaned about people's inability to use bins as I used his trash cart. I also planted a couple of Hollyhocks from the Dog Kennel Hill forest and added some compost [recycled from my aubergine pots]. In this spot one of the hardy geraniums and one of the michaelmas daisies that I previously risked here are also alive - now with a bit of non-dusty soil around them. This side is also less litter heavy so maybe, with the autumn rain it will start looking good. I plan to add to the FoB.

 

This is the one spot where my guerrilla nasturtiums both grew and flowered - yay. They will self seed...

Good Counsel

I have finally split up the very pot-bound mass of irises given to me by rose-gardener extraordinaire and painter Lynette and transplanted them to the Dog Kennel Hill patch next to the handful of sunflowers that survived the various weedings and erratic rainfall (and away from the Hollyhock forest). How can I bear to guerrilla garden irises - one of my favourite plants? Because I dont have a space for them where enough sun would bake the rhizomes! Plus, if I did, I would buy more glorious Flag irises from one of my favourite nurseries, Woottens of Wenhaston. I also planted out 3 more Lychnis and 2 more Aquilegia from my mum helping the strip spread up the hill. Today, on-site, I met a local councillor Stephen Govier who was enthusiastic about my adhoc gardening and might even be able to magic up some mulch.

I end so many posts like this it is getting to be a signature file, but - plenty more Hollyhocks to transplant!