Gaskell House Blogs

Butts, Leaves and a Shed

Posted
10th September 2018
in blog, Garden, Volunteering

It’s a quiet time at the moment for flowers in the garden as it recovers from the drought. But the signs are promising; shrubs I thought were dying have produced new leaves and dahlias are showing the beginnings of very delayed flower buds. There are also little delights such as the morning glory and geranium wallichianum.

Human activity has not stopped, however; the volunteer gardeners not only weed, prune and plant out for later displays but have also rearranged existing garden features and have prepared to erect new ones. By this I mean moving the leaf bin, putting up the new shed and the new cold frame and attaching water butts to the down-pipes. We have been able to buy the shed, the coldframe, the water butts and other garden “stuff” thanks to the grant from Viridor which also paid for the new vegetable bed I wrote about in the last blog.

But the leaf bin was where the shed was to go, the rhubarb was growing where the cold-frame was to sit and the paving in the yard that looked level turned out to have a gentle dip just where the shed was to stand. So the volunteers spent one Wednesday barrowing decomposing leaves from one side of the yard to the other, another mixing and laying a level concrete base and, over the past month, eating our way through baked and stewed rhubarb.

Once all is completed we will have a shed in which to keep our tools. We will no longer have to reach over wheelbarrows and bags of compost to get to the watering can in a crowded bin-shed and in the cold-frame we can nurture seedlings and cuttings for planting out or selling on to raise funds.

I’ll end this blog by moving from photos of practicalities to photos of plants.

Chris Tucker, Garden volunteer.

The interruptions of home life are never ending

Elizabeth Gaskell 1863