Day 125 - Beautiful compost. Proud of my piles.

My photographs have now reached the next March, at which time not much is growing, but there is plenty of evidence of how busy I have been. Apart from general pruning, cutting back herbaceous plants, weeding and so on, I had been conscientiously mulching the borders with my home-produced wood-chip based mulch, produced by shredding my own prunings and stockpiling them to weather. I had a lot of material. When I say I mulched the borders, I mean all of them. I repeat, I had a lot of material, and as I had no front loader on my ride-on mower, all of this was turned and shifted with bare arms and a shovel. There follow some pictures to prove I am not exaggerating. First the orchard, where all the trees have been mulched, including the Walnut in the foreground. I always try to plant a Walnut wherever I go. As they take a while to fruit and 350 years to reach timber size, not so many people bother with them any more. They should be more valued. Same goes for Mulberries.

By this time some of the bulbs between the trees were beginning to show -

Next the borders behind the library. I didn't even leave out this hidden space -

Then the Rose Terrace and the associated borders leading away from it -

From another angle this area had its winter character, which still hadn't fully developed. There was quite a lot of herbaceous content which disappears in the dormant season, but there were also shrubby items and trees which take a bit longer to bulk up and make their impact. For example, at the far end of the next picture, slightly to the left, there are some sticks with a label attached. Unless the label is still intact, I doubt whether anybody knows to this day that this is an Emmenopterys henryi. That is if it has survived -

My beloved Mulberry and surrounding borders got the treatment too -

as did the borders around the croquet lawn -

All this had been achieved from my massive compost heaps in the shelter of the pines at the far end of the tennis court lawn. It was a tidy area, considering it was made of waste material. In the next photo, you can see what I had left after all my mulching, so it is clear that I had made a lot of material through the preceding summer with composting the herbaceous waste and turning it through eight months- and five acres-worth of grass clippings, as well as chipping and shredding everything woody that I created in the pruning of overgrown shrubs and trees. In the picture you will see behind the pine trunk three smaller piles of leaf mould, kept separate by age, the three year-old one being all but used up in the planting holes for all the new borders. To the right of the tree trunk is a heap of composted grass and herbaceous waste, and in the foreground is the pile of weathered chippings I was using as a mulch -

My compost heaps don't look like everybody's. There are no weeds growing in them. This was not a neglected area where stuff was dumped, as it had been when I arrived there. This was the life-blood of the garden. The last thing I needed was to be transporting weed seeds back to the garden in the compost. It is an absolute rule, that if you want a good garden you have to practice good hygiene in all aspects of your work. Weeding should be prioritised to ensure that no weeds are ever allowed to seed, whether in the borders or in the compost area. So many times I have seen gardens maintained by people who have a round which they rigorously follow, regardless of the circumstances. There is no point in spending loads of time perfecting one border in your garden in all its aspects, such as weeding, pruning etc. if at the same time other areas are seeding like crazy, causing even more work for the future. You need to hit what is most damaging before it does its worst. So my compost was always immaculate. That is how I managed to get so much work done. I wasn't constantly chasing things that had got away from me. It beats me why, but far too many gardeners don't seem to grasp this.

The kitchen garden in winter isn't exciting to look at. By March, most of last year's debris should have been removed and the ground cleared for this year's. Some people may have started sowing already, but I was never in a hurry. The greed for early crops often leads to a duplication of work later to fill in for losses, and as I wasn't trying to feed anybody, I saw no urgency for sowing and planting, as long as I had a fine display and product during the summer season, when most of our visitors came. So this was it as the spring started -

Note that for this year I had made some changes. The furthest four beds had been mulched whilst the others had not. This was because they now held permanent plantings for cut flower. The vegetable beds would not receive a chipped mulch, but would be manured with nutritious compost from the other heap as required.

After all my composting was finished I was able to start on the work landscaping the areas around the proposed new building. Although the photographs of the first stages of this are in the same folder as the above illustrations, I intend to treat them as separate, and tell you about it tomorrow.