Recycling (and keeping the critters at bay)

Pin It

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading my blog, your comments and contributions are very welcome. I hope you are not expecting a recap of last year or some resolutions for the new year, as you won't find them here.

My contributions on the gardening side have been woefully absent of late; it is of course a seasonal thing and there are only so many melancholy shots are stark branches bereft of leaves I can stomach.....if there was a nice hoar frost, I'd be delighted and would rush to share the best pictures with you and but we have fine and mild weather with overnight rain, so the gardens look decidedly drab.

I did venture out for a spot of work today which included some recycling of the green kind.



So far no Christmas spent at home has been complete without a real Christmas tree. And whilst I could buy a tree in a pot and replant after the festivities, I know that my plot is too small to accommodate it in another five years. So I still buy a tree but I recycle it afterwards. Not in the throwing in a part of the garden and let nature take care kind of way and not in the taking to the municipal tip way either.

No, I diligently cut off the branches and the stem is sawn into sections. The logs from the stem are dried and will be firewood by autumn, the branches however have a higher purpose: they make excellent groundcover and if piled on high enough are great frost protection. 

This year the spoils of my tree and the tree from the school were used in the school's front garden. It looked messy this morning. I had left the rudbeckia stems as they would look glorious in frosty weather, alas no frosts to be had, so the blackened stems are starting to rot. The local cats had already started to adopt them as their toilet area and so rather than leaving the cutting back until Spring, I decided to do it today. 

In in ideal world (and for proper frost protection) I would lay the branches like fish scales over each other, tucking in and under and piling them three or four layers deep. As I am less worried about frost and more about untrained cats a single or double layer should suffice.

 
It does not matter which way up you place the branches, the important bit is to cover the soil and any plants that the cats are fouling on. Here it is rudbeckias, verbenas and lilyturf that are affected. Don't worry about Spring bulbs, they will still have daylight filter through and will develop as normal.

From a distance the view is calm and green, nothing spectular but stacks better than bare soil and decaying stems.

I was very pleased to see the first harbingers of the end of winter (although we have not really had much of a winter so far). Crocus shoots are starting to make their appearance

A couple of daffodils have also started to send up shoots, these are 'Unsurpassable', a very aptly named variety that I am very fond of. No, I cannot name them from the foliage, but I keep lists of the varieties grown in different gardens. No picture of these as they are only just poking through the soil but the gauras are starting to sprout from the base.

A fine sight for the start of the year, I hope you agree.