Progress with the planters

First thing this Friday morning Steve and Stephen were on site coming to grips with the large pile of scaffolding boards that had been delivered earlier in the week. The idea was to make progress on our planters so that they could be positioned and filled first with rubble and then with soil. Once that is done we can start levelling the ground around them, arranging our crazy paving of bricks and sets and then sowing the grass around them ready for an early spring burst of growth.

However, first to cut all that timber – a tricky job involving quite a lot of maths and angles to create our hexagonal planters. The picture above shows where they got to on Friday morning. But although Stephen was allowed a Saturday morning lie in, Steve and Paula were back yesterday to get them finished. Here they are screwing the angled pieces together – while I made vats full of hot tea and toasted some ginger cake to stave off the icy north wind.

And here are the planters in place at the end of a busy morning. Four in all: one tall one which an adult or teenager could work, one three planks high which a younger child could manage and two low planters that quite small children would be able to reach into. Next week Steve and Stephen will treat them all with a wood preservative, brace them, line them and create bases for them. At some future point we are thinking that the children might like to paint their outsides with plants or animals but for now we just want to get them ‘preserved’. Meanwhile I plan a trip to the wonderful Sunshine Garden Centre who are helping us with this project to talk soil and to start talking about plants to put in them.

Thinking of plants, you can see my poor redcurrant bush by the wall still waiting patiently in its pot to be planted out. I have also dug out the raspberries that were hating being in a pot in the main garden, and have been promised some gooseberry bush roots. So as soon as those planters are finished and I can get at the side beds, I will get them into the ground. And start training the brambles along my bit of rebar ‘trellis’ in the hopes that we will get some nice blackberries.

Building on the success I have had in the main garden with bark – covering the main beds with a big chunky bark to help retain moisture and to discourage the bindweed and the slugs – I shall cover these beds with bark too.

You won’t be surprised to hear that all these activities have been watched with interest by our in house robin….

And we have all been encouraged by the signs of spring next door in my garden. Tiny shoots of wild garlic, little Tete a tete narcissus, the first shoots on one of the roses and the cardoon just ‘rarin’ to get going, tiny leaves of the new season’s Alchemilla Mollis and, of courses, my glorious mimosa tree!