January 2024 – great start!
What a great start January 2024 has brought along. Yes, plenty of gardening work planned however the weather had other ideas. Put into the mix extensive rain followed by sub zero temperatures and into the third week two major storms called Isha immediately followed by Jocelyn bringing very strong winds and rain resulting in all planned gardening grinding to a halt!
“It’s no better in February and March and creeping into April too!”
Well my planned Winter works failed to materialise to the extent I had hoped. These works will be picked up through the coming year but how frustrating it has become over the two months of February and March to have such extensive and prolonged periods of rain and associated windy/blustery spells of weather.
Admittedly there have been very few frosty mornings and snow laden days and yes it has been milder than we would usually expect, yet February only provided me with 6 gardening days and in March providing 12.5 gardening days out of a possible 21 each per month all due to either very wet rained off days, overnight rain with drier days yet leaving gardens saturated and unworkable, or just dry days yet saturated ground not drying up.
Many of my customers gardens have remained soaking wet with pools of water within planted areas and on lawns, so the use of mowers has been limited and even walking over lawns has resulted in visible foot prints which I really do not like to see.
For me and being a true horticulturalist it is a case of “stay off and away until conditions improve” yet there comes a point when you have to try and do the best you can to keep on top of things within customer’s gardens even when the weather conditions really aren’t favourable. (The lawns and weeds within borders just keep growing!) So being selective in the tasks undertaken can at least keep things ticking over until the weather improves.
So keeping things ticking over has included:-
- mowing with the use of my lightweight Mountfield rechargeable mower I have managed to keep the smaller lawns mown
- luckily managed the bigger lawns with my Hayter 46 Osprey which has four wheels and no roller ( the roller can cause damage to saturated grass when turning)
- strimming of lawn edges has been undertaken where I’ve been able to walk on lawns.
- cutting back herbaceous perennials such as Alstroemeria, Crocosmia, . Delphinium, Geranium, Phlox, Sedum
- Pruning of shrubby plants such as Berberis, Buddleia, Cornus, Forsythia (after flowering) Fuchsia, Roses (if not hard pruned in the previous Autumn)
- Yet weeding and cultivating of planted areas has been very limited. In weeding there’s just no way to be able to shake the soil from the weed roots and with cultivating, the soil is just too wet and sticky to be able to leave a soil area surface cultivated as it should be.
A big leap forwards!
Well, what a weird year it has been for me. When you work on your own, things progress as planned when all is well. However when multi-periods of illness affect you, one’s own health becomes priority number one and unfortunately customer’s gardens do have to take second place. Working with a headache, toothache or general aches and pains is just how it is but once an illness just prevents you from being able to leave the house then the necessities of being a gardener working on your own becomes so much harder to the point of being impossible.
So for me it has been a jittery few months and even now finding that I’m running out of steam far sooner than I was before my illnesses which in turn means I’m not attending to customer’s gardens as I had been doing. However, I thank my existing customers for their patience and understanding and although I have lost a few over the last few months, my customer base is still enough to keep me busy through the year.
September
So, slowly picking back up on gardening works on a more even keel I was able to get back into my regular routine for the types of gardening tasks I usually undertake which through September included:-
- mowing and edging at 36no. gardens
- cultivating and weeding through borders at 30no. gardens
- dead heading plants at 30no gardens
- clipping back climbing Hydrangea at 1no. garden
- clipping back Yew to shape in 1no. garden
- digging out plants at 1no. garden
- cutting back plants at 5no. gardens
- creating soil areas around tree bases at 1no. garden
- clipping conifers and box shrubs to shape at 1no. garden
- watering plants at 8no. gardens
October through to December
Continuing through this Autumn into Winter period slowly and pacing myself to try to visit existing customer’s gardens and keep them in as good a condition as I can, yet still realising I struggle to achieve this daily and through each week.
Here’s hoping that come Spring 2025 I can get back to trying to deliver what I have been doing over recent years.
